


The Hunted

by frangipani



Series: Halloween [2]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Explosions, F/M, Fools in Love, General Trigger Warning, Halloween, Identity Issues, Monsters, Questionable decision-making, Rule of Scary, UST, absolutely no one should be here for fluff, action adventure, also stupidity, amnesia trope, do i need to tag bad decisions at this point come on now, horror tropealooza, no last command, that escalated quickly, vaguewriting galore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-21 15:05:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frangipani/pseuds/frangipani
Summary: A smuggling job to an old mining colony yields more than a few surprises. Bad ones.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics from [ here](https://youtu.be/G3OihW5MPKA). Silly cover and playlist [here](http://teagrl.tumblr.com/post/167365602112/the-hunted-archive-of-our-own)
> 
> There might be more than one unpleasant trigger warning-worthy element here to my eyes, but none of it should be more charged than anything else I’ve written (at this point I have set quadrants/tropes to what I write). 
> 
> Takes place *two* years after RotJ, *three* before TTT, but timelines don’t mean a whole lot to me.
> 
>  **This very solidly AU.** Finding out where it's gone AU is part of the gimmick. Also have I mentioned horror? Speculation welcome.
> 
> Don’t nobody yell at me for the stupid names. They’re from canon. Why make em up when they already exist?

__  
__  
_Speak in tongues_  
_I don't even recognize your face_  
_Mirror on the wall_  
_Tell me all the ways to stay away_  


  


  


**6ABY**

The cantina is so cramped that they end up taking the last two available stools at the bar, Mara's shoulders bracketed on one side by the mud-colored wall and by her first mate’s on the other. Honestly, by this point she’s so used to these dumps that if it weren’t for the fact that the sleeve of her tunic is _stuck_ to the wall, she wouldn’t even notice. Grimacing, she takes another drink from her mug and tries not to wonder why the wall is sticky. 

“Know anything about Corbos?” Mara asks, looking over at her companion. 

Her first mate, who goes by the highly improbable name of Jundland Mensio, looks far more comfortable than most human men would, squeezed as he is on the other side by a Trandoshan bounty hunter in a foul mood after being asked to surrender his weapon. 

The bartender’s reasoning is sound. A space like this really is no place for the kind of repeater rifles Trandoshans favor. Clients turned to ground meat at fine establishments near the spaceport is bad for business. Obroa-skai might be a trashbin of a planet, but it belongs to authorities who aren't against meting out a limb-for-limb kind of justice when it comes to their profits. The Trandoshan is all snarl and no bite. 

She wouldn’t be rude to him, regardless-- not that Mensio is rude. Ever.

“Corbos?” Mensio repeats, squinting, both of his hands around his mug as if he’s cold, which is unlikely even if it is nearly frozen tundra outside the temp controlled space of this grungy spaceport. “Sounds vaguely familiar.”

Mara takes a sip of her spiked caf. He has nice hands, calloused fingers long and graceful...and that takes the prize for the most useless observation she'd made today. Mara almost scowls. He fixes things with them and is a good shot. That's all that matters.

“All I know is that it’s a mining world known for their ores. Our request will take us there. If we take it.”

Mensio pauses. “It was the site of a war, I think.” His blue eyes go murky. He brings his mug to his lips.

Mara pulls her eyes away from his hands and flashes him a quizzical look. She can’t pinpoint it, but gets the sense he's uncomfortable. This is the first time she’d seen him fazed by a job in his three months of employ under her. She supposes knowing they were about to go into a war torn planet --but that should have come up in her prelim research.

“How long ago?”

He leans back slightly, his shoulder rubbing against hers. A normal person would take the Trandoshan as encouragement to lean harder against her, and away from the Trandoshan’s reptilian stink, but Mensio hasn't. 

His mug is empty when he sets it in the counter front of him. He'd ordered hot chocolate, a favorite of toublemakers under a certain age, an idiosyncratic order at a cantina if there is any, but it's his usual. “Before the Old Republic.”

She scrunches her face at him. “That’s _old_. I didn’t know you were interested in ancient history.”

He looks abashed for a second. “Yeah, it doesn’t matter. We need a job to pay back for those engine parts.” 

Mara swallows down more of the spiked caf, the image of a plume of fire from her Headhunter’s wing swimming in her memory. 

The scuffle they got into with some planetary sec several weeks ago had been costly. Had it not been for Mensio’s talent at her Headhunter controls, it would have been worse. Much worse. Her Headhunter’s still getting work done in this ramshackle planet, which is just as well because she doesn’t have the credits on hand to pay for all it needs at the moment. It’s why she staked up the first job offered.

Mara looks back down at the dark liquid in her mug. Bitter like low quality spirits should be. The caf is shavit too, but the drink is supposedly free -- included in the broker fee to put in a bid for a job. No such thing as a free drink on this side of the galaxy; she knows the offer is so that clients can discretely check out who they're hiring, either personally or via holocam. You could turn down the drink, but a client might get nervous about how dependable you were and drop you like a flaming actuator. It's a buyer's market. 

Mara lowers her voice. Hunches mean a lot in their line of business, she reminds herself, and Mensio has had some good ones. "You feel weird about it we can still turn it down. Something else is bound to come up.” She certainly hopes so.

His eyes focus on her for a second and he gives her a small smile. "I'd like the Headhunter back sooner rather than later too. Just a cargo run?”

“Should take us three days tops.”

Mensio nods. “Sounds fine.” He darts a quick look around before shuffling his way out of the tight space.

Mara feels a little bad for not squeezing herself back against the wall to give him more room, but not nearly enough. He leaves credits at the counter before telling her, “I’m going to go make a couple of comms. See you at the ship.”

Mara nods, taking another sip of her drink as he goes off. She’s not sure who he comms, but he does so whenever they're planetside. It's odd for a smuggler, then again Mensio’s pretty odd himself, hot chocolate preferences aside. It's never crossed over to feeling suspicious, so Mara has never asked; her and Mensio’s relationship has always been strictly business.

Her eye scans across the cantina by habit, but she knows she probably won't recognize the client who hired her --they send in proxies or use holocams. Obroa-skai is rigged for the big spenders and she's not one. She doesn't actually expect to recognize anyone by sight either, more by feel -- like that prickle in your neck when you're being stared at, but heavier. Along with the _Fire_ , that feeling is what she depends on the most, but she's discovered neither of those two have been enough by themselves.

Mostly it's an issue of simple mathematics when you're pressed up, she thinks wryly, between some sec or other, and some downlevel organization or other. Either you get tagged up and fined half to death, or you get your cargo stolen. In both cases if you're unlucky, you simply get blown clean out of space.

About a year in, it was obvious doing it alone was only getting riskier. She'd had a handful of contacts over at the last sector and sent some feelers out for muscle. Mensio's name had come up linked to some Corellian alloy scammer who'd vanished -- probably grabbed by CorSec.

Slighter than any of the other candidates she’d talked to, she’d been less than impressed. He'd tripped up none of her interior alarms though which was reason enough to hire him. Only a handful of people in these circles don't. She'd make do.

The job had gone well. So she contracted him for the next. That had gone well too. His knowledge of spacecraft and flight is thorough, his skills at the stick are shockingly good, he's only a few notches under a spaceport tech in mechanics, _and_ he knows his way around a blaster. A month in she drew up a full year contract, trying to not to wonder how she can afford him and why he sticks around. Mara figures it's a similar reason why _she's_ at this rundown spaceport, risking her ship for someone else's cargo. You can't put a price tag on anonymity.

Everything had been going swimmingly until that last job. It's getting harder to do business at the Borderlands. Planetary security forces have only gotten more paranoid as world after world switch sides. Mara finishes off her drink. Maybe it's time to go elsewhere.

And there it is, like a thorn pressing up against your skin just before piercing it. She knows how to gauge the level of danger too and this is a baseline threat, the kind she's become used to since taking up this life. But it does make her think that Mensio should have skipped this poorly disguised identification line up like she'd told him to. Obroa-skai is one of the safest smuggling havens in the area; she'd had no need for backup. He might just be going on autopilot from that last Outer Rim hellhole they'd been forced to stop at for supplies.

Mara goes for her own credits to leave a tip. She shoves off the chair just as she spies a human bounty hunter heading to the now open spot beside her with the kind of expression on his face that calls up an instinctual sneer from her, even as the feeling of alarm settles into a higher gear.

She'll be damned if she's going to stay in this scumbucket any longer than necessary.

\--

Clearing off from Obroa-skai isn’t too laborious once you lube up the ranks. After Mara gets her paperwork through and makes sure the inventory is set, she waits for Mensio in the ship, perusing more information on Corbos.

Apparently the planet was the site of a battle between the Jedi Order and some Dark Jedi thousands of years before. Mara doubts that’s more than trivia and buries herself in the layout of the capital city, Delka. 

Mensio’s artoo unit rolls into the lounge area and beeps something inquiring. Mara doesn’t think she’s met anyone so attached to their droid. He’d been the only non-negotiable aspect of the contract. By all indications the feeling is mutual. The droid is rude, but incredibly devoted. He’d been useful once or twice too. 

Mara looks up. “He’s making a comm. Should be back in about twenty minutes.” She wonders if the droid has any other information on Corbos. 

“Hey,” she calls out before the droid can leave the room. “Do you have any files on Corbos? Anything recent?”

The astromech turns back to her and tweedles. There is a whirring noise as it goes through its memory. Suddenly he quiets and projects a holographic image of a man with what looked like a cybernetic eyepatch.

“The Battle of Korriban you said?”

Battle of Korriban? Mara’s about to specify she meant Corbos not Korriban, but the man continues to an unseen interlocutor, “We came across some information that the Emperor would be making a pilgrimage--”

Mara immediately sucks in a breath, cold washing over her. Rebels. This man was a Rebel. Why did Mensio's artoo unit have this recording? 

“We thought to intercept him. Of course, we knew we could not hold him for long, but we needed the information in his shuttle. Our Bothan friends had been telling us for a while about plans to build a new battle station, but we got attacked in the Valley of the Sith. Terrible things there.” The man shifts awkwardly, his hands opening and closing in a nervous tic.

“Okay,” Mara whispers, the words have stopped making sense to her.

“Not just...the beasts...something else. The Emperor’s agents,” the man’s eye seems to bore into Mara, and she stifles a shudder, “are _everywhere_.”

Mara shakes her head. “That’s okay. Turn it off.” She makes her voice firmer. “Turn it off now.”

The artoo unit does as she asks and beeps something. She doesn’t know what it is. Her insides churn. She just hadn’t expected it. Mara closes her eyes bringing a hand to her face as she sits. It shouldn’t affect her anymore. Isard had been a full two years ago. 

She straightens up, realizing the droid is gone. Good.

It's all behind her. While she hadn’t freed Sansia out of anything other than disgust at Praysh and his sick little operation, making out with the _Fire_ had been an inconceivable stroke of good luck. Goodness knows what she'd have done if she’d stayed with nothing but bad memories, or worse, all the holes in her head to keep her company.

Mara goes for a glass of water. Smugglers carry all sorts of information. You never knew when you might need it. If she could have kept intelligence files she would have in a heartbeat. That meant nothing. Besides, she doesn't know when Mensio got the droid. Maybe that recording belonged to its last owner.

She trusts her instincts, she thinks as she drinks the water. They’d lead her to Sansia, the _Fire_. They’d kept her safe for as long as she’s been out, and Mensio’s been with her for months. If there was any reason to be concerned she’d know. There’s a reason she skulks around the Borderlands, in places of ill repute, why she crosses the Outer Rim. This world has no connection to the one she'd fled.

Mara puts the recording out of her mind as she went through her flight prep. She'd been beginning to warm up the repulsors when Mensio walks back into the cockpit after checking up on the holds. Her unease shoots up for a second.

“Something wrong?”

She’s never thought of herself as easy to read, but then again, she’d never spent as much time with anyone else before. It's normal.

Mara shakes her head. Mensio lets it drop as he always does whenever she shows reluctance. She almost feels silly. It goes both ways. She’d like to think she has a good sense about him now too.

They take to lightspeed and Mara sends Mensio off to get some rest. She occupies herself by reading more files on Corbos and its mining operation until Mensio comes back to the bridge in a fresh flightsuit ready to take the watch.

\--

_Everything you love will betray you._

Mara wakes up in her cabin with her heart pounding wildly. It must have been a nightmare, but a strange feeling keeps her from settling down. She's on edge as if waiting for an attack. 

No. She tends to believe in these premonitions, they’re born out of a lifetime of facing danger, but the ship is still in hyperspace. There’s no possibility of an attack here and they’re not scheduled to drop off for more than three hours.

Mara tries to rest, but the wariness doesn’t lessen. It’s probably remnants of the nightmare she can’t remember. There’s a lot of those.

She goes to the galley. Maybe some tea will help. Mensio is there head buried in his datapad. He lifts it in greeting when she approaches.

“Couldn't sleep?”

She nods. It’s not a new question. Mensio’s seen her slinking around the Fire at obscene hours. It happens too often but less than it did before the _Fire_ and less still since Mensio. She supposes it’s the lessened burden of carrying a job by herself. He’d kept his distance at first, vanishing as soon as she stepped in, but she’d stopped him after she’d gotten over the embarrassment several weeks in. No need to treat her with kid gloves. 

She rubs at her forehead. “The usual. Must have had a nightmare.” She gets herself a mug and tea. “I didn’t know you were interested in histories,” she says, half to fill in the silence.

He shrugs. “You never know what might be helpful in a job.” 

Mara thinks of Mensio’s artoo unit, the report given by that Rebel commander...It wasn’t encrypted, the droid simply provided it, so Mensio never meant to hide it -- might not even know it's there. That’s a relief. She could ask about it, but she knows how little _she_ wants to talk about the Empire. Even if he were a former Rebel, surely there’s a reason why he’s smuggling and not reaping the benefits of being with the winning side.

He puts the datapad down. “Something feels...strange.”

Mara feels her eyes narrow. “Strange?”

Mensio smiles, but it looks a bit forced to her. “I might have had too much chocolate earlier or something. Still has some stim, even though it’s not caf.”

That does little to reassure her. Whatever this hunch is, they’re both having it and whenever that happens, nothing good comes out of it. She thinks back to that plume of flame, the scorched wing, her own horror watching it from the cockpit. She doesn't want to be forced to only take jobs in the Outer Rim, but it may come to that, at least until she can afford a new set of transponder codes. But she needs credits to get the Headhunter back first.

“I went to the bridge, looked at the flight path, the auto-nav, and did a basic systems check. Everything is like it was.” 

Mara ponders it for a few moments. She dislikes the feeling, but if there’s nothing tangible to go on, her only choice is to carry on as always. “We need to switch off anyway.”

To his reluctant look she adds, “By all means if you have any leads as to anything off then let me know.”

His shoulders slump down. “I don’t.”

“Then it’s like you said. Too much stim.” She pretends it’s nothing. “Try some of that meditation of yours.”

His face goes guarded and she wonders if this was something she shouldn’t mention. She’d accidentally interrupted him while he’d been meditating once or twice. She’d simply assumed he was religious. That was fine. He’d never looked at her askance for anything or tried to convert her. It goes a long way into explaining a lot of things.

Except now he begins hesitantly, “Captain...do you believe in the Force?”

Her first thought is of a sphere floating slowly towards her, pitch black against pristine white walls. She shakes the memory off and brings herself back on target. She’s not sure why that popped into her head. That’s more worrisome than the image itself. Of course, the stupid recording from earlier stirred up the mess in her head.

Mara thinks of Mensio instead. The galaxy has no shortage of beings who _want_ to believe in the Force, especially now, as if the appearance of one lone would be Jedi is incontrovertible proof itself of the existence of a benevolent higher power itself.

“No,” she says, turning away as she takes a sip of her tea.

\--

The first crackling sound happens about an hour before they drop out of hyperspace. She’s at the bridge going over the map of the area where they’re going to land. 

The intercom snaps to life startling her. It’s not yet time for Mensio to be up. His voice doesn’t filter through the line either. Just as quickly as the intercom came on, it goes silent. 

Mara furrows her brow at it and goes back to her map. Maybe some equipment is acting up. Just what she needs. She’ll check it out soon.

More crackling.

Mara ignores it. 

A loud screech stabs through the air.

Mara jerks up in her seat. Just as soon as it comes it’s gone, but the air is charged with its phantom echo. No equipment malfunction should sound like that. It didn’t sound metallic or mechanical, it sounded ...like an animal shriek. 

That’s ludicrous. Mara grunts and checks the provenance through the system. If the equipment is that disruptive she may as well take a look at it now before they drop out of hyperspace. The sensor says the signal was coming from the holds. Some sort of electromagnetic interference from the conn pods they’re carrying could do it. This is only the second time she’s worked with that particular equipment. 

With a disgusted noise she hauls herself to her feet, twists to crack her back. She could use the stretch, and sets down the hatchway, and down the access ladder to the holds below the ship. The lights come up automatically, bright enough to make her squint. 

Mara goes to the control panel and runs a quick diagnostic on the comms. A few moments later it pings an error. Comms are hardly her specialty and the _Fire_ is not that big a ship. They don’t need it. That can be added to the list of fixes she’ll spring for later. 

She sighs at the thought. That means everything but Mensio’s pay is going to her ship.

Whatever. It’s not like she was planning on using the her credits for anything but the _Fire_ anyway. 

She grabs a glowrod from a side supply closet and hits the special code on the keypad to open the _Fire’s_ smuggling compartment. Might as well check on the cargo while she’s here.

Nothing seems out of place. There’s three conn pods and a closer inspection of the first shows standard readings. Same for the second. She checks her chrono. Time to be getting back to the bridge. Her last look is at the readings of the third.

It’s flashing yellow.

Mara stiffens. Yellow indicates a partial breach in the conn pod’s sterile environment. No one has been down here since Mensio loaded the cargo. The conn pods aren’t hers either. The client was the one who brought them in and Mensio only pushed them inside the compartment, Maybe the client didn’t secure the internal mechanism as well as they should have. That plant inside could be in trouble. Mara almost curses. Whenever what you mean to deliver ends up dead, it tends to affect your pay. Dramatically.

Should she open the pod fully and check on it within? Should she leave it as is? The readings indicate the organism is stable, but how long that will hold given the breach she doesn’t know. Not to mention she doesn’t have the conn pod’s access codes. If she were to open it, that would require protection to keep it more or less sterile and tools. 

“Captain?”

Mara turns around with a barely suppressed gasp. Mensio is there with a contrite look on his face. “I didn’t mean to startle you. We’re about to drop.”

She shakes her head. Actually, it’s not a bad thing he’s here. She could use a sounding board.

“One of the conn pods has a breach.”

Mensio’s eyes widen. “Is that dangerous?”

“To us? Not according to the documents the client provided and the scans.” Mara stares at the conn pod. “These are botanical samples.”

“Botanical samples?” Mensio’s tone is incredulous. “We’re smuggling botanical samples?”

Mara gestures idly. “I’ve transported things like this before.” The ambiguity is on purpose; she’s not eager to let Mensio know she’s only been smuggling for a year. “Usually crops for transplantation meaning to compete with some corporate agricultural giant. Hence the need to keep under radar.”

“From what I’ve read there isn’t anything like that in Corbos. HoloNet says there’s not much there other than the mining colony.”

“Maybe the client’s ambitious, wants to start something.” Mara looks over at the conn pod. “I don’t know whether to check on the thing or leave it as is. If there’s a breach, my first concern is that whatever we’re transporting is in some sort of distress. We won’t get paid the full amount if the sample arrives dead.”

Mensio considers it. “But do we have the expertise to treat it? Say we open it up and it’s almost dead, neither of us can do much about it. Could be opening up the conn pod finishes it off.”

He had a point there. Although arguably a breach means the sample was already exposed to the outside environment to some degree. 

She points to the readings. “Looks stable, sort of. But there’s something to what you’re saying. The less tampering we do the better.”

A metallic shriek rings out and there’s that plunging feeling a second later that signifies they’ve dropped out of hyperspace. Both she and Mensio rush towards the bridge where alarms are screeching.

Mara jumps into the pilot’s seat with Mensio taking his usual spot in the co-pilot’s chair by the nav comp. 

“Something’s wrong,” he says, voice calm enough to flag that something is not just wrong, but _extremely_ wrong. Her own instruments are giving her haphazard readings.

“I see it,” she replies tersely, “I just don’t know what _it_ is. We’re moving towards the planet too fast, we should have automatically decelerated after the drop.” 

“These readings say we have. Something’s wrong with the computer.”

“It’s not responding.” Mara curses. “What the kriff is going on? We can’t land at this speed.”

“You have the landing site.”

“Of course, but at this rate--”

“Pull her up!”

Mara pulls up and curses again. The planet is a growing white and dark green sphere in the canopy, about to swallow them whole. Pulling up to a higher orbit reduces their speed, but now they've lost their landing site and coming in way too hot. Her sensor readings of the planet below are useless, all the instruments are spitting out nonsense.

“I can’t--” She grunts, pulling on the stick as the ship plunges down through the atmosphere. Cloud cover obstructs her view for an endless second. A mossy expanse visible through the white underlayer comes to view just as the controls _die_ , the displays turning off before her eyes. She’s never seen this happen and for a split second just stares.

“Hold on!” Mensio flicks off his crash webbing and darts towards where she’s sitting. 

“What are you doing, we’re about to--”

Mensio hits a couple of switches. “It’s the display! The readings are gone, but we still have the engines.”

“We’re flying blind!”

“Not the first time,” he mutters beside her. 

She glances at the side. The nav computer is still spitting out data. Maybe that can help and she undoes her crash webbing.

“No!” Mensio yells. “I don’t need--”

There’s a boom from somewhere and she’s off her feet on the deck. They’re falling from the sky, she thinks and pulls herself up as Mensio screams for her to hold on. She claws for purchase onto the co-pilot’s couch as the deck shudders. Her stomach wrenches violently. The next successive drops threaten her hold on the console until the final one catapults her back to the bulkhead.

She has a strange sense of slowing down even as she’s flung through the air, but her back hits hard enough to make her see stars. When she finally gathers her wits about her, she’s flat on the deck, everything still; the ship has stopped. A second later it occurs to her what this means -- Mensio actually landed it. Without the instruments.

He’s beside her. “Captain,” he calls. “Captain are you okay?”

Mara manages to nod. “You?”

“I’m fine.” He continues staring at her. She forces herself to stand through the pain in her back, but ends up having to prop herself on the bulkhead. It feels like a bad bruise, a really, really bad one, a sprained rib possibly, but her breathing’s fine. She’s lucked out.

“What the kriff just happened?” she hisses.

A troubled expression comes over his face. “I have no idea.”

She stumbles over to the nav comp and drops on the seat, the motion highly misguided, her back informs her. 

“I don’t know how accurate this is anymore. I don’t trust it. I’m going to have to cross ref to see how far we are from Delka.”

Mensio looks around, her datapad is wedged between some consoles, and he reaches for it. Its screen is cracked. 

“Still works,” Mensio announces, passing it to her.

“At least.” Mara pulls up the data she’d been looking at, the planetary map. She clicks on the location finder and waits while it searches for a signal. Finally some coordinates and a geographic map come up on the screen

“Yeah, nav comp is useless. We’re about a fifteen minute flight to the nearest settlement.” Dismay settles into her. “Not Delka though. That’s on the other side of the continent.”

Mensio goes back to the main console. “We’re going to have to run the diagnostics manually. The main computer’s link-up is fried. We could try to see if the altitude thrusters can get us closer--”

“No. We already took a risk putting her down. I don't want to take another before knowing what went wrong.” She looks over at Mensio and can't keep the wonder off her voice. “I've never seen anyone fly blind.”

He doesn't meet her eyes or respond which she finds odd.

“Anyway,” Mara goes on. “Let's check on the cargo, figure out how much damage we took. Then see if we can hobble our way to the settlement.”

She stands up with a wince as her back throbs. 

“I’ll do a quick scan,” he says. “Hopefully everything is in one piece.”

Mara turns her head in his direction as he leaves, wondering how his optimism doesn’t manage to seem trite.

\--

Her check on the smuggling compartment a few minutes later is more thorough than it first was. This is how she notes that the conn pod signaling yellow is actually broken -- not just internally. There’s a small circular opening the size of her closed fist visible from the back...for a second Mara thinks this is the result from the crash, but upon a closer examination it seems as if something pushed it out. She can still see the plant inside though.

Mara frowns. That doesn’t make any sense. The other two conn pods look fine. Behind it though on the bulkhead she sees a viscous liquid dripping down. Lubricant? She cocks her head. 

Maybe some solution that was housed in the conn pod had some pressurization issue? She doesn't see anything liquid inside though. The plant doesn't look scratched up either.

She goes back out, feeling uneasy and tracks down Mensio to the engineering area under the bridge. There’s a strong reek of burning metal all over the deck, the temperature far higher than it should be.

“The primary memory blew,” Mensio says, not looking away from the access panel he’s half disappeared into. In a normal situation she might pay a bit more attention to the fact that he's stripped down the top of his flightsuit, but the circumstances are far too serious for that. “I’ve never had this happen before. This is a relatively easy fix, we can switch to secondary, but there’s worse.”

Mara inhales. “Okay.”

“The primary and secondary engine power cells blew.”

"That's why it's hotter than a furnace here." Mara closes her eyes. Grounded then, and without the Headhunter. Does it have to get _worse_?

He darts out from the compartment. “Luckily they held on enough to help us land, but...”

Mara nods heavily. “We can’t do anything about that now. We’re going to have to get to the settlement and see if they have parts there. Why’d it happen?”

“Not sure. There’s some weird lubricant leak on the wires, could be what happened.”

Mara starts. “What?”

“Yeah. I got some there.” He points to some nearby micropliers. 

Mara picks them up and focuses on the thick amber liquid at the end. “Doesn’t smell like lubricant. I saw some at the bulkhead in the compartment. Thought it was resin or something.”

Mensio tilts his head. “From where?”

It’s going to take too long to explain. “Come take a look.” 

\--

Mensio blows out a breath as he looked at the conn pod. “I don’t like this,” he mutters.

Mara crosses her arms over her chest. “Neither do I. I mean after we do the drop we can argue that the client never secured it properly, but I don’t think they’ll pay--”

“That’s not what I mean,” Mension interrupts. “I think whatever was in here got out.”

“It’s a plant.”

“Is it? Resin’s here and it’s in the computer system. It’s not coincidence that the computer system wiring is close to here. There's also a mess with some comm wiring.” He gestures above them.

“I did a prelim scan when we loaded it like I always do, and it registered.” Mara toggles through until she finds the readings. She offers him the datapad, “'photosynthetic eukaryote.'” 

“I think we should take a closer look," his expression turns grim, "Could be something hitched a ride in it."

Mara curses under her breath. Stanging obvious. Stupid, useless scan.

Mensio is already leaving the room. “I’ll get the tools.”

\--

A few minutes later she’s carving up the conn pod with a fusion cutter. Inside there’s a long thin green trunk. That’s not what draws her attention. 

There’s a cocoon on it. It’s open and covered with that thick substance.

She lets out a string of curses and pulls off her mask.

“It’s a kriffing wire moth.” 

Mensio takes off his own. “What’s that?”

“A pest. Like a mynock, but an insect. It can bore through anything.” She raised her palm, fingers spread. “About this big. It probably squeezed out. It’s dead already. They don’t live more than two hours unless they have a colony nearby.”

“That’s...good, right?” Mensio stares at her warily. “We just find it and throw it out.”

“Yeah...right after it ate up the computer hook up and our comms. We have to throw everything out.” Mara yanked off her gloves. She wants to kick the damn conn pod. “Get those things off the ship in case there's more. That kriffing scan is worthless.” 

She’s such a moron. 

Mara storms back up to the bridge, feeling her frustration rise like a wave. It only increases more when she plugs in the settlement’s coordinates. Three kriffing days by foot.

The planet is not inhospitable. At least where they are the climate is temperate. From the sensors, she finds they landed in a forest, the settlement is right across it. The path crosses a river, which is convenient, but Mara still wants to slam her fist against the console.

Wire moths never just _sneak_ into ships. She should have been more circumspect about the client, less desperate to get the Headhunter back. Mara grits her teeth. How could she have known someone was targeting her? She’s kept her head down. Covered _everything_. She buys a new set of transponder codes as often as she can. Not often enough, clearly.

Mara sits hard enough that the ache in her back makes her bite her lip to keep from whimpering.

This is nothing, she tells herself. She has her ship. So she made a bad deal. It was bound to happen. Most smugglers are affiliated with some larger group these days for their protection, and she...she’s always prized her independence and these are the downsides. Someone will message her with a threat soon. She’ll ignore it and limit herself to jobs in the Outer Rim. That's it. 

Mensio’s footsteps sound soft and tentative behind her.

Mara gently puts her datapad down. She should go and help.

“All done," he announces. "We can notify the settlement and see what they want to do with the conn pods." 

"Already?" she rises carefully from the seat. Her back doesn't appreciate any movement, it seems. She's going to have to take a painkiller.

“...I found that moth thing. You were right. It was already dead.”

When she turns she sees he has it speared onto a metal pole as long as a hydrospaner, that resin-like liquid dripping down. It’s a wire moth all right, a black worm with gauze-like gray wings half the size of her palm and antennae as long as her forefinger. Being right about it offers little comfort. The moth made all the damage it was intended to do. 

Why the kriff them? All their jobs have been minor. Why should they be singled out? But the questions do little to remedy the situation. She should know that by now.

Mara reaches for it. “I'll go incinerate it. We should assemble packs and get ready to walk tomorrow. It’s a three day hike." She stops. "You know what, maybe you can just stay--”

“No.”

She snaps her head up at his tone.

“The parts are too much for one person to carry.” He hesitates and she braces herself. "Artoo found this in one of the conn pods.” He extends his open palm. 

At first she thinks he's holding a cred coin, but it has an imprint of circle framed by three spokes on either side of it on its surface. 

Mensio’s voice is tense. “You recognize it?”

Mara shakes her head, tension leaving her. “No. Probably it’s the calling card of whatever organization runs this sector. Leave it on the console, I’ll check it when we’re out of this planet.” Mensio might be concerned, so she adds, "They're usually not that subtle. I expect apart from that I'll get some transmission about how we're supposed to pay tribute to some warlord, consortium or other soon. The sooner we get out of their turf, the better."

The worried expression doesn’t leave him.

"What is it? Someone _should_ stay behind with the _Fire_."

“We just don’t know what’s out there even with the geographic maps. The ship will be fine. We’ll lock her down and Artoo can keep watch.”

If she's ever at a point where an astromech is the _Fire's_ safeguard, things would be dire indeed. That doesn't change that Mensio has a point. The geographic maps aren’t as detailed as she would like. It’s not the latest tech. 

“Okay. Well, let’s assemble the packs tonight and get ready to leave first light. You have the planet profile. I’ll send you our route.” 

\--

_“Everything you love will betray you.”_

_Distant roars echo through the air._

_Before her, a colony of wire moths take shape. They bore through the _Fire_ , eat through its hull until nothing is left. Now she has nowhere to go. _

_From somewhere unseen, mocking laughter rings out. A woman’s voice._

_“Your cooperation is what we would have, Mara Jade.”_

Mara sits up in her bunk. The movement makes the enormous bruise in her back start throbbing.

She fumbles around her cabin for the painkillers. It’d eased up before she went to sleep, the painkillers must have worn off. 

She slides herself off her bunk and occupies herself with double-checking her pack. Afterwards, she goes to the galley. It's almost time to go.

Mensio shows up not too long after with his own pack in hand. He seems ill at ease, more so than she’s ever seen him, but he doesn’t volunteer and she doesn’t ask. 

Mara tries not to wince as she slides her pack on over her bruised back. The painkillers haven’t kicked in yet.

Daybreak bathes the area around the ship in a dark mossy green color, the trees have vaguely yellowish undertones. As far as forests go, it’s not memorable to Mara. The ground is rocky and hilly. To the distance she sees various mountains. The scene is typical of mining locations. 

At least she knows now where the bad feeling came from.

\--

By mid-morning the forest seems vaguely golden. If she cared one way or another about pretty views, she’d appreciate it, but she’s too concerned with keeping to the projected path, with the bad deal. The air smells strange though, a slightly metallic note under it.

While Mensio has always been content to leave her to her silences, he seems quieter than usual. Has it settled on him how incompetent she is? Or is he too busy kicking himself for the mistake he made when he signed on?

They stop for lunch when the sun is high and he’s unwrapping his ration bar when he asks, “You knew the wire moths thing, wasn't...coincidence? Has it happened to you before?”

Mara shakes her head and takes a swig from her canteen. This is what she’s been going over in her head. “No. Just heard of it. You haven't?”

“No. So they're used for...sabotage.”

Mara nods. He’s quick as always. “Sometimes to get rid of the competition. I should have screened the client more closely.” 

She toes at a piece of bark near her boot, and leans back against the tree behind her. Large organizations do; they have eyes and ears everywhere. 

“Last I heard it happened to someone in Mazzic’s crew. Ate through the kriffing flux connectors as they were leaving Fondor with sec in tow. Bad time for a hyperdrive to fail. Even being part of Mazzic's operation didn't help them. Nothing's foolproof.” As she says this, she thinks she’s lucked out again. She smiles mirthlessly, kicks at another piece of wood. 

Luck has an expiration date.

Mara turns her thoughts to something else, she asks, “Something on your mind? You’re quiet.” If he’s thinking of jumping ship, she’d rather know and not let it linger in the air.

Mensio looks around. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to do something like this.”

“Walk through the wilderness?” She unwraps her own ration bar.

Mensio nods and seems a little hesitant when he says, “I’m more familiar with deserts. Raised in one.” He takes a bite of his ration bar. They both eat in silence until he says, “Tatooine.”

Mara blinks at the memories, just a bit before Endor. _Before_ is not that big of a problem. Muddled, but sometimes she thinks if she actually sat down she could untangle it all. The problem is that she can't do that without touching _after_.

“Not that far from here. I’ve been there,” she finds herself saying. He straightens up as she corrects herself. Not like she can salvage looking like an idiot by faking more than she knows. “Was going. But then, something happened and I was rerouted.”

“Rerouted?”

“Was going to take a job there. I never actually set foot in the planet.”

Mensio stares at her for a moment like he’s trying to read more than she’s saying, but there isn’t more. She’d dropped off hyperspace only to be told to turn back, return to Coruscant, and await further instructions. One minute, she’d been waiting for orders in her quarters and the next, she’d woken up her knees burning as two stormtroopers dragged her across the Palace's carpeted flooring towards the lower levels. Unnecessary of course, but Isard had been making a point. Mara pushes the memories of after away. After is not good.

Mensio has lowered his gaze. “You didn’t miss much. It’s just desert.”

“Jabba’s turf, no?” She tries to avoid Hutt space or anything close to it as a general rule. It’s not safe for minor players like her. The problem is the territories in the Outer Rim are always changing hands. It's not that much safer than the Borderlands, just dangerous in a different way.

“He’s dead now.”

Mara can’t help the bombastic lilt. “Yeah, done in by a _Jedi_.”

Mensio doesn’t laugh. He raises his eyes to her. “You don’t believe it?”

Mara crosses her ankles. “Last I heard Karrde’s people were making short work of Jabba’s operation downplanet.” She makes a sweeping motion.

“Karrde?”

“Talon Karrde. Ever heard of him?”

Mensio shakes his head.

“He works quietly, traffics more in information than material, though he moves a lot of material too. I don’t know a lot myself. Anyone that takes on a kajidic though...”

“You think he did it.”

Mara takes another bite of her ration bar. “More plausible.”

“Why?”

She almost says because she doesn’t believe in the Force, but stops herself and examines Mensio. He’s looking elsewhere, visibly uncomfortable, but there’s something dogged in his demeanor. Maybe it’s the religious thing. She doesn’t feel like going through a back and forth about this of all topics right now. It’s obvious to her.

Mara shrugs. “Doesn’t really matter either way.”

She doesn’t know why, but she gets the feeling the answer doesn’t please him, as if he’d like to keep discussing the matter. 

She thinks of the recording she saw, the Rebel with the eyepatch. That Jedi fought for the Rebellion, didn’t he? Killed the Emperor, is what people say. If the recording _did_ belong to him, if Mensio used to be a Rebel, then maybe the Jedi was some sort of symbol to him. That the Jedi went to the Outer Rim to rid planets of Hutt yoke might be part of the propaganda machine. Who knew what the truth was? Maybe he didn’t even exist at all. 

They finish their lunch in silence and continue their trek. The later it gets, the quieter the woods become, but she doesn't remember many sounds to begin with. Is this normal? It’s been a long time since she’s wandered out of civilization. Though to be fair, in these past years civilization has consisted of one grungy spaceport after another.

“Maybe we should set up camp here,” Mensio murmurs as the last of the day’s light leaves them in the gray of the woods, lit by the wan light of the system's two tiny moons. 

She looks at the map they’re following. Here is fine. It’s near where they thought they’d end up. Mara lowers her pack. Mensio still looks ill at ease, certainly more vigilant than usual.

“I’ll take first watch.”

Mara nods, expecting as much, as she gets the fire started. The temperature has plunged considerably, but the fire makes it manageable. The crackle of the flames soothes her nerves as she fishes out another ration bar.

“Where did you go,” he asks, “after you got called from Tatooine?”

She stiffens, these are not memories she’s keen on digging up, but she knows well refusing to answer only gets beings to dig further or makes them suspiscious. “All over.”

“Where’d you go first?”

Mensio has never pushed like this. “Why?”

He blinks. “Just curious,” he replies lightly as he gets his own ration bar. "Wondered if you'd always worked the Borderlands."

She shakes her head. Is _she_ getting paranoid? Months of sharing the cramped space of a ship -- her ship -- should be enough to get a sense of a person, she reminds herself. Mensio’s proven his trustworthiness plenty of times. Her intuition has been right more than it’s been wrong too.

But when it’s been been wrong...

"No," she says. Mara crumples the ration bar wrapper. That was different. She’d known Isard was a monster underneath it all. She’d felt the woman’s slime even when she herself had been traipsing around court, pretending to be a vac-brained socialite. A wire moth in butterfly cover. "During the war, I was working in the Core."

That’s what the Empire had been, hadn’t it? Whether her master had known or not didn’t matter. Not that her memory before Isard’s any good to go by.

That’s all done though and there’s one bit of comfort in these circles she moves in now. For all the illegalities under the table lot, things in the fringe have some measure of honesty. If someone gets blasted, it's over credits. She appreciates that kind of certainty. No principles but the ones you pay for.

"I've never spent more than months there," Mensio volunteers after another bite of his ration bar.

Mara searches for something bland to say, settles on, "It's a mess too. Just a different one from here and the Outer Rim."

"Where in the Core were you working?" He finishes the last of the ration bar and slips the used wrapper in his pack.

Mara feels her eyes narrow, patience fraying. "You must be really bored. There's nothing interesting to tell. I thought we operated on a need to know basis."

"We do?" She doesn't answer and he says, "I was surprised you didn’t ask me more. When you hired me, I mean.”

She frowns at him. There'd been nothing but that association to that minor leaguer in what she'd she'd found out about him, true, but there was the absence of that warning feeling. It's not anything she wants to explain or be questioned about. Her instincts are all she needs. There'd been a couple of candidates she'd sent packing even before they'd opened their mouths. Once she got a sense of Mensio's skillset, she was even more reluctant to ask questions, too concerned that would scare him off. 

That in light of the wire moth incident feels like rubbing her face in it. “Should I have?” she asks sharply.

He shakes his head quickly, chagrin filtering through his face. “I don’t mean it like that. Not about background. Work background,” he fumbles. “Things of a personal nature.” He meets her eyes and quickly looks away, color rising up his face, obvious even by firelight. “It’s not a criticism, Captain. It's not.”

Mara squints at him, her irritation fading to confusion. She has no idea what he’s talking about. 

“You could ask me about more than my work history,” he blurts out.

She’s certain none of the confusion has left her face. This is a bizarre moment for him to talk about work histories. She’s about to say so when the ground shakes. 

Propensity for earthquakes is not in the literature about Corbos. 

“What is that?” she hisses as the ground shakes again and again. The decrease in interval makes them seem like footfalls...of something huge.

Mensio is on his feet, head up as if he’s searching, but Mara sees nothing around them but trees, their shadows, and rustling leaves. What could make footfalls like that? 

Something big.

“We need to go.”

Mara doesn’t need to be told twice. She reaches for her pack. The ground beneath her hasn’t stopped shaking and Mensio is shouting. “Run!” 

She's about to do just that when the trees collapse in front of her like matchsticks. 

The illumination from the fire glances off the belly and chest of an enormous beast, about five meters tall. It’s thick arms have four long claws, two huge tusks curve down at either side of a gaping mouth full of sharp teeth. Spikes line down its hunched back.

For a second, Mara can’t move. The creature extends one of its bulky arms towards them, faster than something that big should move.

 _Move_ , she thinks, but her body doesn’t seem to listen, part of her unsure this could even be happening.

And then Mensio pulls her away, yelling, “Run!” 

The creature roars and she’s running as quickly as her legs can carry her through shaking ground. She stumbles, triping over something, there’s damp ground under her hands and Mensio’s grabbing her and yanking her up. 

The creature’s roar leaves her ears ringing and she feels a wash of warm fetid air just before Mensio gives her a shove that sends her forward. 

She drops into a roll among the dirt and leaves down one of the small hills, as she tries to stand she feels something unyielding below her, cold like metal, and her hands scramble on it, recognizing it instinctively. 

It’s a hatchway.

She pops up to scream Mensio’s name. In the dark of the forest all she can see is the creature towering above, shadowy and enormous. It’s from the direction it's looking that she sees Mensio’s form. He’s reaching for something.

Mara whips out her holdout. There’s no way her blaster can do a thing against anything that big even if she could aim at a sensitive spot. Mensio is too distracted trying to get at his blaster. Why is it in a pocket? Why isn’t he using the one at his hip?

Her holdout spits fire, streaking red in the dark of the forest as she stands and runs in the opposite direction.

Dimly she hears Mensio scream “No!” 

The beast charges towards her, reaching her in two massive steps. She’s still shooting and running. Air whooshes beside her as it swipes. She throws herself down, tumbling back from the creature's grasp, pushing off with her heels.

Something digs into her back, pain blossoming. But there’s stone behind her now, a hill made of a cluster of boulders by the feel of it.

The creature nears, slashes its arms, scattering stone and dirt, Mara rolls away, covering her head. Then somehow Mensio’s there pulling her, into a narrow space between the stones. It’s not only narrow, she finds she can’t stand. Everything is shaking.

The creature bellows. 

Mara feels it scratching at the bottom. She feels Mensio against her back, his breathing far more even than hers. Feels him reach again for his blaster, he’s pulled it out. She feels the cylinder of its muzzle of it between them. 

She can see it now: the beast digging them out. Mensio whirling to fire.

It’s not going work. 

She takes a deep breath and clarity sneaks in. Mining colony. That’s why there was a hatchway. That likely means that there’s a structure underneath the forest. She’s seen it in the maps. 

In some situations, trying to conceal the goods from prying eyes, entrances are often disguised into the landscape around them. Not that hard if you knew what you were looking for. Why would there simply be a cluster of stones...

The beast roars, the stones around them shaking, dirt raining down from above. Light from one of the moon filters in. On the side of the stone there’s a rudimentary control panel. Her hand reaches it before the darkness descends upon them again.

The beast snuffs damp, foul-smelling air into the crevice where they huddle. Mensio crowds her back more.

She slaps the button. There’s a wrenching sound and nothing beneath her for one terrifying split second, but then she’s on an incline, Mensio tumbling down next to her. 

Instinct has her rolling on her stomach, a hand darting out to grasp Mensio’s arm. Her other reaches for the vibroblade at her hip and stabs down hard above them.

The material gives and the blade gets some purchase, drops a bit due to her weight and Mensio’s, but the incline isn’t that steep. 

They stop sliding. 

She breathes for a few moments, but doesn’t let go, of the blade nor Mensio’s arm.

“You okay?” Mensio pants.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

She lets go, the incline isn’t steep at all here, the material must be plastoid for her blade to go in. Mara breathes for a few more moments. She hears muffled roaring outside. 

“What the kriff was that?” she whispers.

“I don’t--I don’t know. Good thinking though.” 

“I could have sent us down an endless drop,” she mutters shakily.

Mensio chuckles breathlessly. “Sometimes the best way out is down.”

She scowls. “I knew that blaster of yours was going to be as useful as mine.”

“What blaster?” 

“You didn’t get a blaster? Up there? Weren’t you getting it when you pushed me out of the way? I don’t know why you carry it in a _pocket_. What happened with your other one? Did you lose it?”

“Oh, I--”

“Kriff,” she swears. “I dropped my holdout.” 

Mara digs through her toolbelt for her mini glowrod and clicks it on, her back begins its protest about the continued abuse. She puts it out of her mind. They're in a tunnel. She can't see the opening above them, but doesn't think they're that far down. The incline is no longer that steep. She can keep herself up with her heels and doesn't need the blade. 

She scans over to Mensio, who’s just finished sticking his stupid blaster in his pocket. She would say something, but she’s busy scrutinizing him for injuries. He has plenty of scrapes and underbrush stuck to him, like her probably, and his flightsuit it torn up at various spots, but at least by the dim light of her mini glowrod she can't see anything alarming. 

Relieved, she can't keep her annoyance over the blaster. It's not like anyone expects to be attacked by something like that. No wonder Mensio forgot about his main one still holstered at his hip.

She pulls out her blade and puts it back in the sheath, while Mensio gets his glowrod.

“What is this place?”

"Mine tunnel.” Mara scoots down the incline, pain flowering all along her back. “Depending on how large the mines were sometimes some of them had alternate entrances and exits to access different areas. They’re unlabeled to not attract attention, but they’re not meant to be hard to find. Good to move supplies to and from places.” She remembers hearing about this being another way a company could protect its assets, only the company knew all the points of entry and exit.

She wonders how any mining operation could have sprung up with something like that prowling the woods, but doesn’t feel like thinking about that right now amid the muffled sound of roaring outside. 

As she climbs down, Mara guesses they're at maybe three floors below the forest. The holdout is waiting for her on the ground when she reaches the bottom of the incline and she palms it, relieved. The incline has lead them to a tunnel, walls of dark rock at either side of them. 

Corbos was abandoned by the company conducting operations shortly after the Empire consolidated itself, a few years after the Clone Wars. None of the information had mentioned why. Mara couldn’t imagine the Empire having any interest in an outpost such as this. They had access to ore elsewhere.

“I think we should spend the night here,” Mensio says. “We can go back for the packs at daybreak. If that...thing is out at least we’ll be able to see it better.”

“Yeah,” Mara agrees. It even hurts to sit down. She wishes she had a painkiller for her back and tries to focus her attention elsewhere. “We can scale back from where we came once it’s close to morning.”

Mensio’s eyes flicker to her. He looks distinctly unhappy. 

“What is it?”

“I wish we had our packs with us.”

“I’m glad we’re alive.” She lifts the glowrod, there’s more darkness in front of them. She'd rather the larger glowrod from her pack herself. “Mine shaft. Old. Probably not a good idea to wander too far. Wouldn't want to get lost and I don’t know if it’s still stable or ready to cave in. No one’s used it since the Clone Wars probably.” Her lip curls. "Make is Corporate Sector flimsy. Plastoid."

He nods and turns to look off in front of them to the darkness. “I can keep a look out if you want to sleep.”

Mara doubts it, but who knows what else awaits them. She's better off giving sleep a shot when she can. She turns her glowrod and lowers her head to her knees, ignoring the dust, stale air and the prickling cold.

\--

_“Everything you love will betray you.”_

_Flickering flame light makes shadows dance on the walls._

_“No,” she whispers. “No-no-no.”_

_A wire moth’s flapping wings._

_“Shh,” comes back to her, a soothing touch at her back._

_“It’s your cooperation that we would have, Mara Jade.”_

Mara wakes up with a jerk. She blinks a few times. Mensio has his glowrod turned off. She can’t see him in the pitch black of the tunnel, but senses his eyes on her. He’d continued first watch and she’d dozed off, albeit with some trouble, her senses on high alert whenever she heard that thing roar.

She rubs her face and checks her chrono. She woke up about fifteen minutes early. Not too bad.

“I’m up,” she rasps. “I can take it from here.”

In the same way she’d felt his eyes on her, she feels he wants to say something. She waits. 

“You're okay?”

“Yeah, why?” she grunts. Weirdly enough her back doesn’t hurt. “You?”

“Fine.”

Mara hears him shift, probably to a better position for sleep. “I don’t hear that thing anymore. Haven’t for a while.”

“We didn’t see any trace of it on the way here. Chances are it’s nocturnal.”

He’s quiet. She strains to hear anything outside, but he’s right, nothing.

“Captain,” he murmurs.

“What is it?”

“You shouldn’t have come back for me. When you went back at it with your holdout.”

She makes a face. “Is this some kind of chivalry bantha shit?”

He sounds taken aback. “No, I just--”

“Glad to hear it. You’re my crew. Of course, I’d go back for you.” 

It’s not a policy per se; she’s never had crew before, but it makes sense.

Mensio yanking her away, shielding her with his body pops into mind. It goes both ways, she supposes. She _is_ responsible for him, in a way. Had she thought about it like that when she’d first looked for someone? She should have.

“Anyway I wanted to thank you,” he replies.

It's the same as covering for someone when you're being shot at, she reasons. And she's done that. “You don’t need to.” 

He doesn't say anything more for a long time. She assumes he's nodded off. After a while, Mara moves a few yards down the tunnels with her glowrod. She does notices that there's a ladder not too far. 

A soft sound in the dark makes her stop. It’s barely audible.

_tick tack tick tack_

Clicking? Some sort of machinery? She strains her ears for a long moment --

_tick tack tick tack_

There. Scratching. It sounds like scratching. It could still be machinery, but where is it coming from? She holds her breath, listening. An even longer moment passes. She couldn’t have made it up. Just as she’s doubting she heard it in the first place she hears it again.

_tick tack tick tack_

It’s just as low, probably from a distance. Mara turns around, going back to the area she’d just left. It doesn't seem likely that it's machinery given that she hasn't heard anything else. If the mines are abandoned and there's that thing in the forest, it might be that other animals had the same idea they had. Maybe they’d sensed her and Mensio, and scurried away.

She turns off the glowrod when she comes back. Mensio seems not to sleep any better than she had. In the darkness she hears him shift constantly. She wonders if she should wake him, but decides against it.

There’s an endless stretch of time, passing quietly, save for Mensio's restless movement, the shuffling sounds bit eerie in the dark, so she tries to occupy herself with other thoughts. The thing outside seems to be gone or have quieted and she hasn't heard anything from the tunnels for hours.

Mara spends most of the time thinking of the creature. Had that thing been here when the mines were operating? Had miners hid here? Is the settlement fortified? It has to be if there’s anyone there. Maybe the thing doesn’t wander that far.

She tries not to think of stumbling into a planet full of them.

Her chrono beeps and she almost jumps. They’re close to daybreak. She turns the glowrod on. Mensio turns away at the light, exhaling. He'd positioned himself half sitting against the walls. He’s still pretty bruised and scraped up, dirt smudged on his face. 

“Our path was going to take us to a river. That should give us a chance to get all of this off.” Mara gestures to her own face. Should she mention the scratching sounds? They're not important, especially next to that nightmare creature that attacked them. The cause could be anything from rodents to slugs, disgusting but harmless.

He nods and turns to the incline behind them, some sort of supply shaft. “We could scale it back up.”

Mara follows his gaze. It’s not an impossible climb, but neither is it an easy one. She’s more than a bit hungry. Not the best conditions either, even if her back is still doing surprisingly fine.

Mara recalls the ladder. This time she thinks of it in conjunction to the hatchway. “Wait, while you were out I saw a ladder. Might be going up to the surface. Let’s try that first. If it doesn’t work we can climb up.”

They set out with their glowrods. Moments later, Mara is gently pushing the hatchway open.

“I don’t think it’s there anymore,” Mensio says below her. 

That seems to be the case and she pushes it open the whole way and pulls herself out. The woods look as they did the day before, the yellow trees brighter. They shouldn’t be that far from where they set up camp, but she doesn’t like wasting the morning searching for their packs. 

Nothing to be done about it. They need them.

Hers, they find easily under a pile of twigs, branches and leaves. His is gone, torn pieces of fabric scattered on the ground a few yards away. Mensio has moved further eastward from where they came. A few minutes later, he calls out to her.

She goes over to where he’s squatting. He points to what she supposes are the remains of the bedroll, there’s a solar charger beside it, but no sign of the datapad it’s for. 

“I don’t think there’s much of my pack left. We could try searching more, but I rather we keep moving.”

Fantastic. Mara sits and digs through her pack. 

“Me too. We’ll have enough water once we get to the river.” 

She takes out her medpack, but stops. If her back no longer hurts, there’s no need to waste meds. She rummages for a ration bar instead and halves it. 

“We’ll ration, that should give us enough until we get to the town.” She offers him the half and then goes back to her pack as she chews, pulling out the datapad and clicks on the the ‘find’ function in the map.

“Last night’s little adventure didn’t take us too off course, good. We’re only a couple of miles from the river.” She finishes the ration bar and takes a swig of her water canteen. “We should make it here before nightfall.”

“And after? Can we find another way to access the mine to take shelter?”

Mara puts the datapad away. “There should be. But we’d have to search the area with the map, it shouldn’t be that hard.” All of that means arriving well before dark. She stands up. “We should go.”

\--

The woods are serene as she noticed the day before. Today, after the creature’s attack the fact seems more than a bit foreboding. They’d been hiking for more than an hour and while she waits for there to be indications of activity, the forest is tranquil, nothing but their footsteps.

“That thing last night,” Mensio begins. “It reminded me of something that...”

She glances at him. “Something that what?”

“Something that doesn’t exist.”

Mara’s brows draw together. “What do you mean?”

“Looked like a--a rancor.”

“A rancor?” Mara’s seen holos once or twice, heard rumors that the massive creatures were used in the military training facilities in Carida, but she’s never been to Carida. There was a lot of baseless hearsay when it came to training. The words "military mystique" pop into her head. “I’m not familiar.”

“I saw one. A few years back.”

“Like this?”

Mensio shakes his head. “Much smaller. Didn’t have all the spikes or tusks.”

“Where?”

He pauses. “Tatooine.”

Mara raises her eyebrows. “They have rancors in Tatooine?”

“No, no,” he shakes his head, “It was a pet.”

Mara bursts out laughing. “Are you joking? A pet? Something like that?”

He looks like he's about to explain, but stops, his face lighting up. 

“What?”

“It’s good to see you in better spirits, Captain.” His expression becomes more subdued at her puzzled expression. “You’ve been worried since we lost the Headhunter at Grenaku.”

“We didn’t lose the Headhunter. It’s being repaired.” She goes on ahead. As soon as she gets credits it’ll be back. 

“I wish--”

“Don’t apologize. Given the odds, you could have been debris in space. The fact that you came back, not to mention that you brought back the Headhunter alone...it’ll get fixed.”

He catches up to her. “We could have had it back if you'd taken my pay.”

“I don’t do that. Your pay is yours.”

“And I choose--”

Mara stops walking. “We’ve gone over this, Mensio. The _Fire_ and all attendant to it are my responsibility. I appreciate the offer, I do, but I made the choice to take the drop. You shouldn't be penalized for it.”

“I don't see it as being penalized. If we had the Headhunter we could be at Delka.”

He says it mildly, but it stings and she dashes forward.

Mensio catches up to her, making a noise of frustration. “I’m not questioning your judgement, Captain,” he speaks quickly. “I understand why you’ve made the choices you did. I...”

Mara doesn't answer. She knows he isn’t, but the fact is she's botched this, all of it, and it’s embarrassing.

“I don’t need the credits,” he says almost reluctantly. “I have a pension.”

Mara almost stops walking. Only one side of the war pays pensions now.

He sounds pained. “I should have told you--”

The recording. It belongs to him.

“None of my business. Doesn’t change anything.” It doesn't. She'd rather not know, but it doesn't. “You’re entitled to fair pay for work.”

“Not at the expense of both of us. I wanted to tell you,” Mensio insists, “I just didn’t know how you'd react.”

“It doesn't matter.” She hopes it sounds convincing. She doesn’t want to continue the conversation, there's too many awful associations tied to it. “Not in our trade.”

Mara can’t figure out why he looks so disappointed. What does he expect? Her to fawn over him like some sort of liberator? He already fought in the winning side, there's plenty of other places to go if he wants recognition for it.

They reach the river a bit later than noon. 

Mara goes to check the water for pollutants -- one never knows in mining areas. After getting the all-clear from her scanner, she washes her face, and fills her canteen while Mensio does the same. It's not the most comfortable weather for a dunk, but Mara she prefers that over a day of wandering around with forest floor all over her. 

She strips off her flightsuit and underclothes and wades in, leaving her sanitary kit at the banks of the river. She dips her head in to wash her hair. When she looks over at Mensio's direction he’s looking at her datapad, consulting the map probably.

She wades back out, going for the towel in her pack and dries herself best she can before she slips her clothing back on. Mensio still seems absorbed in the map. 

After, she plops down next to him, looking over his shoulder to the map. “See anything interesting?”

He seems to startle, his face turning crimson. “No. I wouldn't --” He stops when he meets her eyes and then veers them back to the datapad. “I wouldn’t... know what’s interesting necessarily. The topography is nothing I’m familiar with.” She thinks he's wincing a little, but she doesn't knows this area either. 

Mara nods and takes the datapad . “Go get clean then. We only have this.” She lifts the towel. “But it’s dry now, at least.”

The red had faded somewhat from his face, but it’s back in full force now. He does grab it from her and heads the few paces towards the river's bank. 

Mara toggles for a thermal read of the area, hoping that will alert her to where to begin to look once they get further. While nothing is dramatically eye catching, there are some spots where the readings are promising. 

She raises her head, about to mention it. Mensio is in same place she was in the middle of the river. He’s facing away, looking off at something, and Mara’s eye roves over his naked back and lingers.

She knows Mensio is conventionally attractive, but it’s not the kind of good looking that would shock you or distract you. She wouldn’t have hired him if it were, simply because that sort hardly seemed reliable. Court is one of the few things from before she recalls with dizzying clarity and there’d been plenty of them there who’d thought their luck in looks and wealth was reason enough to be given the whole galaxy. 

_A beautiful garden_ , she almost hears the echo of an affable voice that never fails to make her feel bereft, _needs its hedges trimmed from time to time_. 

Some of them wanted too much.

Her eye doesn’t stray from the line of Mensio’s spine, the broad set of his shoulders. He’s fit without the hard edge of it often found in this trade. It’s the kind of good looking that sneaks up on you. Her eyes tend to catch.

But he’s also the kind of good looking you can ignore, and Mara does, because this kind of regard on an employee, someone she _pays_ is exceedingly dangerous. 

He turns around just then. She should look down, but keeps her gaze squarely on him for a few seconds. 

“I think I found a couple of possible coordinates," she speaks up. "I’ll show them to you once you’re done."

Mara hears the swish of water as he comes back and avoids looking up. It’s then she realizes that was probably what earlier was about. She has no idea what the people are like where he comes from; there might be modesty notions. Maybe he has someone waiting for him. Maybe it’s the religious thing. 

Mensio sits next to her in his undershirt, his flightsuit down to his waist and peers over her shoulder to her datapad. She'd be taken in by the way he smells like forest and the heat coming off from his skin, along with her own pathetic impulse to burrow her face into his chest, but from here it's impossible to miss that ugly gash by his shoulder -- the one furthest from her. The wound is swollen and reddened though it looks like it might have stopped bleeding. It's nothing like the other scrapes he has on the rest of him, or the scrapes she has for that matter. She'd missed it last night. 

“Did that thing get at you?” Mara puts the datapad down and leans in. In the back of her mind she notices there’s light scarring visible from this close below his collarbones all around it, spindly and broken up by the tank, but that’s trivial next to the garishness of the wound.“That doesn’t look so good.”

He looks down. “I guess.”

"'I guess'?" Mara goes into her bag for bacta ointment. “It doesn’t hurt?” It looks like it should.

Mensio shrugs. “It’s not bleeding.”

That makes easy to simply push the ointment and patch at him with a shake of her head and pretend it's all normal.


	2. Chapter 2

__  
__  
_Hide the sun_  
_I will leave your face out of my mind_  
_You should save your eyes_  
_A thousand voices howling in my head_  


  


  


They reach the spot she'd marked on the map during the late afternoon and find a hatchway maybe an hour and a half later, around twilight. It leads down to another mine shaft not too different from the last one, save for some exposed storage shelves along the opposite wall.

Mara hands Mensio her pack and examines them, perusing the various cobweb-laden tools for mining droid upkeep. She leans and blows lightly on the shelves and under the small cloud of dust that lifts, 'VerunaCorp' becomes visible on the handle of a vibropick droid attachment. She doesn't recognize the company, but the emblem and general make of everything seems fairly standard for Corporate Sector as far as she knows. When she looks back, Mensio is sitting against the wall a few paces away. He's placed his glow rod beside him, so she can't really see his face.

Mara goes over to him and sits against the opposite wall from where he is, shutting off her own glowrod. This tunnel is just as narrow as the other; she and Mensio would barely have space between them if they were to stand side by side. Mara digs out another ration bar and splits it. This amount takes the edge off the hunger without really getting rid of it, but it’s manageable for now. 

“I didn’t see any fish in the river,” she starts, “but we could see about fishing.” The moment she mentions it she’s unsure about the delay. It’s not a good idea, just her growling stomach talking.

“There’s nothing alive in the river.” Mensio had grown increasingly withdrawn the later it got; he's wearing a distant look now. Mara chalks it to concern over that creature now that it's nightfall. She wants to hope they're out of its territory.

The certainty in his tone gives her a slight chill. “How are you so sure?”

He stays silent for a few beats. “I didn’t see any.”

“Well, we have one more day of hiking, and we should make it close to the outskirts. There might be a supply outpost before then, so it might not be worth wasting the time."

The settlement could be abandoned too. Mara tries to shake the notion off. It's unhelpful now, but the thought takes sinks its claws in. The readings she has are of a cluster of plastoid and duracrete structures, she has no way of scanning for inhabitants, and with that thing out there...

“Yeah, I rather just keep going," Mensio interrupts her spiraling thoughts, reaching for the ration bar half she's offering with a wince and an intake of breath. 

That display makes her freeze. “The shoulder?”

Mensio pauses, then nods grudgingly.

Alarm gathers inside her and she shoves the remaining bite of her ration bar in her pack, digging for more ointment and a new patch. “With the bacta ointment it should be better.”

He shakes his head. “It’s nothing to warrant that much attention.”

Mara scoffs as she goes through the medkit, trying to ignore the congealing disquiet. “Let me be the judge of that.”

Ointment and patch in hand, she darts forward. 

"Captain--"

"You need a fresh patch anyway. Like we need something else to be worried over." She scowls at him. "Off."

With reluctance he unzips his flightsuit and pulls the side down

She freezes once she gets a good look at the wound. It looks far worse than it did earlier in the morning. Far worse than it should look if he only got it last night.

“What?” Mensio looks down self consciously. 

Her hands feel clammy as they grip the patch and ointment. “The bacta should have gotten the swelling down.” It’s not normal for it to be in that state. The words scroll over in her head. Not normal. Not normal.

Mensio drops his head to meet her eyes. “No, it’s fine.” 

Right on cue, the ground shakes, and she feels her blood start rushing. It’s not one thing in particular. It’s being stuck in a cold, damp mine shaft while some enormous creature -- or creatures -- roam above. 

It’s having to move further and further away from the _Fire_ knowing that it’s been maliciously damaged, hoping the nearest settlement will have everything she needs. It’s her Headhunter lightyears away, kept from her until she comes across the credits to get it back in working order. It’s her first mate wounded, the extent of which he doesn’t seem to realize. 

She’d been on a good streak up until recently. She’s due.

“I’m fine,” Mensio reassures, peering up at her. "Probably needed more ointment. I didn't spend as much time on it as I should have. It'll be fine. I promise."

His words become unintelligible to her in the shaking all around them. The creature can’t get at them here. It couldn’t have seen them. There was no indication it was around when they'd hiked here.

Her hands shouldn’t shake. Not after what she's been through.

She whispers, “You think it’s the same one?” 

Concern is back in his face. “I don’t know, but it can't get to us here."

She licks her lips. “How many do you think there are?” 

"Just one." He reaches forward to take the ointment from her trembling hands. She leans back after he whisks them off, clenching her jaw. That’s all she needs. Mensio seeing her flail like a spooked mynock, like he hasn't seen enough.

She steadies herself, over all of this winding feeling. “You mentioned it’s something that doesn’t exist. But it’s a rancor, right?”

“Similar, but a different species." He makes a vague gesture. "Like a...sand demon back home is to a lylek.”

Mara purses her lips. She’s heard of lyleks from Twi’lek, mainly through idiomatic phrases that make it clear it’s a big predator of some sort. “Sand demon. From Tatooine, was it?”

He nods. “No one has actually seen one, but plenty have seen lyleks.” He grimaces a bit. "Unfortunately."

“So this thing that looks like a rancor but isn’t one is what -- some kind of mythic creature?”

He nods again, visibly uncomfortable all of a sudden. “Something like that.”

Mara makes a face. She can't believe this conversation they're having. “Any weaknesses?”

His eyes unfocus as he thinks back. “Not that I know of. Old texts say, that--that they’re the product of... alchemy." He looks down at the ointment. "Perversions of the dark side of the Force. They exist in places steeped in it." His expression grows increasingly troubled. "There was that war here...between Jedi and Dark Jedi. They weren't called Sith yet...not...codified as such, but just as malicious.”

Mara scowls. Of course. The dark side of the Force. Sith. Myths for the gullible. She makes a disgusted noise and shakes her head. "Before the Old Republic, right? That means before these mines. Nothing lives that long."

Mensio's expression shadows. "The symbol on the coin."

"What about it?"

"It's a very old Sith Order symbol."

Mara rolls her eyes. "Oh, come on.There's no connection," she says to Mensio's uneasy expression. "Please. The coin's a classic scare tactic. Some wannabe sithkriffers from the Zann Consortium used to use all sorts of bantha shit iconography for a while to intimidate people in the Cor'ric sector. They wised up when Black Nebula took it as an invitation." She exhales. If there was any doubt that Black Nebula had succeeded Black Sun, there was none after that. "What are these mythic dark side rancors supposed to hunt anyway?”

Mensio pauses. “Jedi.”

Mara barks out a laugh. She can't help laughing harder at Mensio’s borderline offended expression.

“It’s a good story,” she consoles in between. “It's...I just,” she breaks for air, “If that thing's up there looking for Jedi.” She wheezes a little. “It’s shavit out of luck.”

Mensio looks down, but a smile creeps onto his face almost in spite of himself. 

“Entertaining.” Mara darts forward and plucks the ointment and patch from his hands, feeling much less on edge, "I'll give you that." She brings her focus back on the wound. As ugly as the wound looks, if it were infected it'd have discharge, or he might have a fever. He wouldn't be regaling her with tall tales like this. 

“Maybe you’d like to put on a shadow play for me by glowrod light next?” She raises up on her knees. He might have used too little bacta like he said. She may as well do it herself.

"If you like." His expression turns rueful, but amused as his eyes flick up to her. “I don’t think I’d be any good at that though.”

“Really. Might just,” she puts the salve carefully on the inflamed area, a bit of her earlier wariness over the wound resurging, “be the only thing you can’t do.”

“There’s a lot of things I can’t do.”

“Mm. Piloting, mechanics, shooting.” Mara gently presses the patch over it as she continues offhandedly. “Not too shabby.” She looks at the patch, obscuring the wound. She’s done. He'll be okay. She's just on edge. Twice now he's been in a mess because of her.

Mara orders herself to draw her hands away, but can’t. Instead, they stay where they are fingers on the patch, the flat of her palm against the skin of his shoulder. Her gaze travels down to where his is and locks on.

“That okay?” Mara asks, her voice feels a little strained. She drops slightly; they're at eye level now.

“Yes.” From this vantage point the blue of his eyes seems pale and endless.

Her eye wanders down further to his lips as her heart thuds differently from before, pounding madness in her chest. She’s too close to do anything but lift her hand up to the side of his face as she brings her lips to his. Just that light touch sends a flush through her, not unlike the flare of satisfaction at meeting a craving. Her hand drifts drifts down his stubble-roughened cheek, finds the edge of his jaw and rests there as she pulls away only slightly only enough to change the angle, feel his lips differently.

His hand covers hers, and she almost draws away, but he lifts his head, and his lips are fully against hers. The ground above shakes again and there, she jumps back.

What is she doing?

“That wound needs to heal,” she says, covering the panic that shoots up, occupies herself with turning and looking through her pack for her datapad, her back to Mensio.

 _Why_ did she do this? _How_ could she? She’d just told herself she wouldn’t and the timing is _absurd_... 

Her hands close around the pack hard. She wants to fling it to the wall. She shouldn’t have hired anyone; she can barely keep _herself_ in one piece. All she’s doing is compounding mistakes and making a complete fool of herself.

Mensio clears his throat. “Captain?”

She flinches. Apologize, she thinks. Swallow your pride and apologize. She dispenses the credits. It’s her own stupidity and there’s no justifying it. The stanging comms he makes. Maybe even to a significant other.

It’s all mortifying.

She pushes the words out without turning around. “I apologize.”

“No,” he says quickly. “Please don't. Apologize, I mean. I...”

How gallant, she thinks. Just let it go. The less they speak about it the better.

“I--”

“Your droid showed me a file of yours. Accidentally. Before we got here,” she blurts out quickly. She doesn’t want him to say anything; this is the first interruption that comes to mind.

Mara faces him. “Some military report.” Mensio’s startled...and the's a flash of fear on his face. “Talked about some place called Korriban. I’d originally asked it about Corbos. So I knew of your... background.” She turns to sit with her datapad in her lap. 

“I-I wasn't hiding it," he speaks just as quickly. "Really. I didn't mean to. I just--”

“It doesn't matter.” The stricken look on his face is odd. Hadn't he insinuated earlier he was military? Mentioned his pension? "I mean it. I would have brought this up right after if it did. Just thought you should know,” she finishes, and kriff if that doesn't make her feel any less of a moron. Mensio still has that fearful look, but its tipped over to some confusion, probably at the fact that the statement came out of nowhere.

Mara changes the subject. “Look, it was too soon for me to contract anyone. It was my mistake.”

“Too soon?”

“I’ve only been smuggling for a year,” she confesses. Right now, the admission is less distressing than her throwing herself at him like a desperate tooka. “Should have specified that. I wasn’t in a position to hire. I meant it that I wanted larger jobs. Had too many close calls, but that should have told me to scale down not up.” It makes sense once its out of her mouth. Perfect sense. Maybe that’s why she crossed the line, to _force_ herself to do this. It's a good idea. It really is. Stroke of stanging genius.

He waits several seconds before speaking. “I was wondering why you didn’t partner with one of the bigger organizations -- like Mazzic’s.”

Her answer is automatic. “Don’t need a boss.” She returns to the previous line of conversation. “I’ll pay you two months,” she finishes, knowing it’s just a starting point. A high one for her, she thinks, looking down at her datapad screen, but Mensio’s saved her life. She can’t do much else, even if it'll leave her with barely enough once he raises -- especially after this nightmare job. Mara ignores that wringing feeling in her stomach. It's a good idea. Everything she's saying makes perfect sense.

She’ll figure out what to do about the Headhunter later. Mara looks up and lifts her chin, waiting for him to raise.

His expression becomes drawn. She gets the feeling he doesn't want this at all. 

Mara doesn’t know why. He could find a better position elsewhere. 

“The wire moth thing along with everything else shows I can't keep a crew. I shouldn't have taken this job because I couldn’t do a proper client screening, and safer jobs don’t give me enough to give anyone a decent cut. Just doesn’t make sense.” She bites her lip, not even knowing why she feels the masochistic need to explain. “Financially. You could try the big organizations yourself. They might even give you your own ship.”

“I don’t -- “ he breaks off with a frustrated noise and his eyes wander about the whole of the tunnel as he thinks.

Mara folds her hands on her lap and waits. This is how things have to be. 

When Mensio's eyes focus again on her, his lips tighten.

 _Raise_ , she thinks. Hirings and departures are always subject to bargaining. This is how things work.

“Three months pay,” he finally says. His tone is clipped and reluctant, but she recalls some reluctance when they first set the terms too. It’s another quirk. Some people just don’t like to bargain. But then, she’s seen him haggle at the spaceports with far less distaste than he's shown with her.

“Two and a half.”

His reply is a flat, “An extra week.”

She nods. It won’t be impossible to swing, definitely on the low end of what he can ask for. “Fine.”

There's a few beats of silence and a hopeful note when he responds, “Can we bend the...formalities?” He adds quickly, "Rather not use the last name.” He raises his hands. “All I meant.”

She feels her lip twist. “You prefer your first? Jundland?”

His smile holds more than a bit of chagrin. “Comes from a place near where I was raised." He stops and looks at her, expression strangely probing before he looks away with a dejected sigh. "Jun for short." 

Jun. Sounds better to her, though it makes no difference. "You could have told me that's what you preferred."

He shrugs, still looking off. "You're partial to official stuff." 

It may be the case, but, "A name is not that big a deal."

He seems to brighten and turns back to her. “And you’re-- “

“Still a captain of a ship,” Mara cuts him off. At the very least. That is something else.

“Of course.” Mensio -- Jun --nods and demeanor even-keeled, but she gets the odd sense he's disappointed.

“I can take the first watch tonight. You should get some rest.” She grabs the remains of her half of a ration bar, sticks it in her toolbelt, and stands with her datapad in hand. "I'll go over there."

“Captain,” he calls. 

Mara stops, hands tightening on the datapad.

“We’ll get out of this.”

“Yeah.” She resumes walking, takes a spot several feet away where the datapad’s backlit screen won’t disturb.

\--

_“Your master is dead,” a woman’s voice speaks. “The power he gave you no more. What will you do now, Emperor's Hand?”_

_Flickering flame light makes shadows dance on the walls._

_“Everything you love will betray you.”_

_A wire moth lifts from the shadows. Its wings are flapping._

_The distant echo of screams._

“Captain?”

Mara jerks awake on the bedroll. “I’m up.”

She stretches as Mensio clicks on the glowrod, then checks her chrono. It's daylight as she expected. He has her pack, and she follows him to the ladder, still trying to shake a lingering feeling of forebodding. Another karking nightmare, she thinks as Mensio opens up the hatchway and they both climb out.

Mara doesn’t think he slept well tonight either. Once she even thought she heard him mumble things, nothing intelligible to her, but enough in the dark of the mine’s tunnel to ratchet up her unease. That and the sound of his restless movement on the bedroll made her consider waking him, but the thought that she’d be doing it for her own comfort, rankled too much to carry through. It's been a rough couple of days for them both.

Other than that there’d been no strange sounds and she’d spent most of her time awake last night poring over the maps, memorizing the routes and trying to come up with a cross referenced layout of the section of the mine in their area. Today’s path should take them to the outskirts of the settlement. She hopes that there will be some sign of civilization along the way, since she’s not sure they’ll be able to make it into the settlement by evening. She’d rather not another half a ration bar dinner again.

Mara squints at the morning haziness overhead. The weather records mentioned the possibility of rain, but it's a low enough percentage that she's not concerned about it for the moment. A few paces from the hatchway, the beast’s footprints are visible on the ground. Mara walks along the edges of it, still with some dread at its size. She could lie down in it, arms and legs extended, and still have a feet feet remaining. 

There’s a path of felled trees towards the east -- probably where that thing came from. Their own path takes them north and hopefully away.

She and Mensio -- Jun, she catches herself, now that she's more awake-- share a ration bar, wash their faces in the stream, and fill the canteens before continuing the hike. Mara finds the quiet in the woods even more unsettling today, the crunch of twigs and leaves too loud in the air. 

“There should be birds or something,” she muses.

Jun looks over to her. “What?”

“The fact that we haven’t come across any wildlife. I don’t know. If it's true that there isn't any fish in the stream...” She frowns. “That thing has got to eat. What’s it eating now that it can't get it's usual diet of Jedi?” She shakes her head, trying not to smile. 

Jun purses his lips, even annoyed Mara has to drag her eyes away before her damn mind can wander. She'd been doing so well this morning.

“It doesn’t _need_ to eat.”

Mara tries, but fails to hold back a snort. It's soft though. “Right...alchemy, was it?”

"They can subsist on the dark side alone." She marvels that he sounds dead serious. "Depending on the potency of their location.”

Mara looks around. The forest apart from lacking wildlife and its corresponding sounds _looks_ normal to her. Not anywhere she’d consider potent in dark whatever. 

“I’ll give you another theory," she says quietly. "That rancor thing could be some animal that came into contact or consumed some of the chemicals used in whatever mining operation they had here. The make of all this is Corporate Sector and they have a lousy track record of dealing with waste. That thing could have wiped out the local animals. Relatively recently too, which is why the forest still exists. In a while though...it won’t.”

She feels her frown deepen. That means the chemicals could still be around in the mines. She'd spent most of the night trying not to think of this.

"Both of us should be long gone before then," she finishes.

Jun doesn't argue, but doesn't look sold. He hasn’t point blank said he believes in all that babble, but it couldn’t be clearer that he does. 

The one upside to her theory would be blaming last night's particular bout of stupidity on noxious fumes. 

This karking job can't end fast enough.

Mara pulls herself back on track. “Only one of those things in the forest," she says half to herself. Jun had thought so too. How did it come to be in this place anyway? Was it indigenous? Was it brought here as a rancor before it came into contact with whatever it did? Why? A disturbing thought occurs to her. If it is the same one...it’s following them. 

She stops. No, she’s certain.

Jun is looking back at her. “Captain?”

“It’s hunting us.” Another thought follows on its heels: that it can track them means it’s got some sort of intelligence. 

Jun's face turns guarded. “I wasn’t sure. I thought we could leave it behind yesterday, but that didn’t seem to be the case. I guess we didn't cover enough ground.”

“Or that it can track us.” Voicing it does little to dispel the dread.

“The settlement is bound to be walled off then or have some sort of protection.”

The settlement might no longer be there. The thought flits through Mara’s mind, dread turning into ice. It’s is too horrifying to consider. To be stuck here alone. With that thing.

She resumes her hike with brisk strides.

\--

The sun is just over the horizon, but even with their rushing, they remain a couple of hours away from where the map indicates the settlement would be. 

Mara gazes off between the trees with a fervent hope for some sign of an outpost, strains her ears for the sound of repulsors, but there’s just the stillness of the forest. It feels quieter now the settling sun lengthening the trees’ shadows, creating an eerie latticework before them. If she stares in any direction for too long a shiver threatens to snake down her spine.

She hates the dusk here.

“I found another hatchway to the mine,” Jun calls a few feet away. “We should go in.”

Mara stares off more. She’s always hated running and hiding. She’d hoped for _something_ to signify that they’d be soon to put this behind them. 

“I’m going to keep walking for a little bit,” she calls back. “I’ll loop back before the sun sets.”

Jun makes a chiding noise as he walks to her. “I want to get out of here too, but I don’t think we’ll find anything for a few more hours going by the map. If there’s no outpost this far, there’s got to be a reason for it. We should just go down to the mines.”

“I’m not saying I want to get to the settlement now. I just want to see some indication that it’s out there.” 

Mara can’t explain why she’s so impatient. It’s like a hunch, that feeling of wrongness that hasn’t left her...not since they’d departed from Obroa-skai. If anything, it’s gotten _worse_. It's making her anxious for any sign.

Jun's gaze feels probing. “You feel weird?”

“I don’t know.” She’s trekked through wilderness before, not recently, and not with anything following her, but she shouldn’t feel like this. Her nerves are prickling, her heart beat picking up. Sunset is still a good half hour off. For now, they’re safe.

It doesn’t feel that way though.

She continues forward a few meters until the vegetation peels off to reveal stones, hundreds of them, like stagmites reaching up from the ground, undergrowth and ferns between them. The tallest one is maybe nine or ten feet. Haphazard patches of limestone are a dull gray in the thinning light, the rest is blackened with moss. They line up the hills before them in aimless winding paths. 

“That’s different,” Jun says in a tight voice behind her. “Come on. Let’s go back. We’ll go through it tomorrow when there’s more light.”

But she walks forward to take a closer look at the stone nearest her, places her hand on it --

Ragged screams ring through the air. Shrieks. Hundreds of voices.

She jerks her hand up and takes a step back with a gasp.

“Captain.”

The echo of the voices remains. Mara shakes her head, but it refuses to clear. So many of them. 

“What...is that?” she whispers. 

She looks around trying to find a source, but sees only the jagged stones before them. The more distant ones are oddly reminiscent of rotting teeth and she shudders as screams continue reverberating through her head. She's imagining them. The woods are too quiet.

Mara closes her eyes. Stop.

“What is what?” Jun’s tone grows sharp with concern. She feels his hand on her arm. “We have to go.”

Mara nods dully. She can still hear them distantly as she walks, no amount of pretending makes it otherwise. 

It’s hard to focus on the climb over them. Vague wailing makes her hand close on air and her footing slides off the rung. She lands heavily against Jun’s chest, fortunately he's off the ladder and on the ground. His hands around her waist pull her up and she finds her footing. She closes a hand on the sides to steady herself.

“Okay?” he asks, voice raising slightly with concern. “Captain?”

He doesn’t let go.

“Captain, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she mumbles. The distant shrieking isn’t going away.

“Captain?”

She shakes her head, but he lets go as she moves away, going to sit by the floor of the tunnel, waiting for her head to clear. It _has_ to. All of the screaming is barely audible. She's just imagining it.

“Something’s wrong,” he says

Mara tries to think. Neither of them are eating that well due to the rationing and they’re not sleeping that well either, but that can’t explain it -- it's only been a couple of days. Is it something in the forest? Some mild hallucinogen that she’s ingested or had contact with somehow? The chemicals in the mine. Suddenly she’s going for her pack, ignoring Jun's increasingly worried calls. 

She slides the scanner on her finger and Jun freezes.

A tense minute later the scanner beeps. Normal.

By then the echoes are gone.

Mara looks on to find Jun staring at her. She feels ridiculous, but relieved enough to lower her head and laugh softly.

“What,” he asks slowly. “Was that?”

“I thought I was hearing things.” She lifts her head. Jun's been exposed to the same environment she has and he's fine. “The forest was so quiet.” Jun's eyes lower to the scanner in her hands. “I didn’t know if maybe I had come into contact with something.”

Her head is starting to throb. It’s just a headache though, probably indicating they should eat. She searches for a ration bar in the pack. It’s the usual routine, she halves it and offers part of it to Jun. He shakes his head.

"You take it. I'm not hungry."

She fixes him with a scolding look. "You had half of one of these for lunch. Of course you are."

He shakes his head and takes on a recalcitrant look. "No. Maybe you feel that because _you're_ hungry. You should have it."

Mara rolls her eyes at him. She will do no such thing. Jun can be incredibly stubborn when he wants to be. So can she though, and puts the half of the ration bar away for the moment.

“That reminds me,” she says over her bite. “I should check how that wound is doing.”

Jun’s uncomfortable expression when she mentions it doesn’t help, but she hasn’t noticed him in pain today at least.

“It’s fine. I’ll check it out myself later.”

Mara lifts her chin. “Let me see.”

“It hasn’t hurt at all.”

“Glad to hear it.” She searches for the ointment and the patch.

His expression drifts into apprehension when she turns back to him.

“I don’t see why you’re so reluctant if it’s that fine.” Which is worrisome, she thinks as she scoots over. 

He goes for the slider of his flightsuit and pulls the top of it down. Mara carefully peels the patch off. Given that he hasn’t protested during the day or had any reduction in movement, she’s expecting that the redness and swelling is down. 

It’s gone. Completely.

She blinks a few times. Her headache makes her brain struggle to piece together what she’s looking at. She _remembers_ the disturbing state of the wound last night. She remembers his hiss and wince. She remembers dressing it. 

Before her eyes though, there’s only unmarked skin, no trace of any wound.

In a flash, bits she hadn’t recognized as a pattern reveal themselves as such, all of her first mate’s idiosyncrasies, things she’d taken as quirks.

“Captain.” Jun’s voice is cautious.

It would be, she manages to think distantly, because she’s now sure Jundland Mensio isn’t human.

"Captain?"

Mara doesn't reply. She'd overheard plenty of insinuations at court about the Colonies and the Outer Rim, lawless places rampant with dangerous non-humans or near-humans of every sort. With non-humans, you could tell went the whispers. You knew what you were dealing with. But a near-human? With some freak mutations like the Chiss you knew, but some looked just like anyone else. They were different _inside_. No one was sure about what sordid things went on at the borders of the Empire, only whatever it was should stay there. Contained.

But those are just more stupid stories. Ignorant rumors. Mara has hardly crossed the expanse of the Outer Rim, but thus far, she hasn’t seen anything that different from anything else. Credits are credits no matter the hand, paw, tentacle, or other appendage they're from. 

And nothing could be as low as the Imperial detritus left. It wasn't that it existed, but that it had _always_ existed within the Empire like a terminal disease. The rotten, diseased core of it.

“Are you all right?” Jun's eyes are fixed on hers. 

An old saying from court flashes through her mind, _near human, not near enough_ inevitably followed by husky laughter.

She flinches, closes her eyes, and nods. "Yeah, fine," she croaks.

So much makes sense. The faint scarring on his chest she'd noticed is consistent with electrical burns, the kind anything from neutronic whips to electrostaffs can cause. Some prisoners got bacta after, so the interrogation could continue. Sometimes they were left as is -- if the information they were thought to possess didn’t merit the hassle. The lucky ones. Had he been picked up before or during his time with the Rebels? 

Mara draws her hands up and sits back. 

The latest it could have been was two years ago when the war ended. About the time when she'd escaped, sometime before Coruscant fell, but it's hazy and confusing just before and only a little less so after -- a mess of skulking around dark alleyways, sleeping on abandoned spice dens, and stealing her meals, barely remembering her name. It might have been days or a week, but she isn't sure. Sometime after her head straightened out and she'd been picked up by one of Praysh's hechmen with a promise of work. Things are clearer from that point. Clearer still after she arrived at Tropis. Praysh was just another thug, and a careless one at that.

“I just have a headache,” Mara murmurs. “I’m glad the wound's gone.” 

Jun looks down at the healed skin and then back up to her, there's some caution and some incredulity in his face. “I...heal quickly.”

She reaches for her canteen. “Lucky.” She can only imagine what it must have been like to get those scars. The thought makes her stomach turn. She'd been part of that. Maybe it's for the best she only remembers pieces of what she did, what was done to her. Everything evens out. 

She wants to drop her head in her hands.

Jun stares at her at a loss. Mara closes her eyes and leans her head back against the rock wall. She’d rather not take a painkiller, but her head’s throbbing is getting to her. That and the roiling of her stomach. A few minutes of the thudding and she goes through the pack for the medkit, pops the pill in her mouth and washes it down with her water.

“I don’t like this place.” She waits for the pain to subside, clutching the canteen. 

“I don’t either.” Concern passes through his face. “At all. Captain...” Jun’s shoulders tense. “I wish...we could...renegotiate.”

His words hit her with a pang, “You want to raise more? Men--” she catches herself, “Jun.” She stops. She can go up a bit more. It was too low anyway.

“No, not like that. I don’t...I don’t need the credits. I don't want them. I just...”

His pension, right. 

A few beats of silence and he blurts out, “You were an Imperial, right?”

She flinches again and looks away, the shame of it makes her want to lie, but she can't. "How do you know?"

“The way you do things. You're...precise.” She doesn't answer. “Everyone was one at one point, right? I...wanted to join the Academy myself...” He doesn’t have to say more. It falls into the puzzle perfectly. 

Blood tests were part of the entrance protocols, weren't they? Maybe some Tatooine official sore about his placement in a nowhere planet decided to take his frustrations out on any with the gall to request entry without meeting the genetic requisites. None of that was uncommon. Her stomach roils some more.

Jun continues, “Anyway, things are different now.”

He isn't wrong. The Borderlands skirmishes are the Empire's last gasp and all the victories the Rebels are having have left those bottom feeders too busy scrambling to survive to care much about her. She doesn't lead the easiest life, but someday she might even stop looking over her shoulder. She thinks back to her year before Jun, but can't remember the close calls she knows she had. She remembers the quiet. It's not the worst thing in the world. Not by a long shot. All of that is behind her. And still...

"So if that worries you given my...background....it shouldn't.” Jun scoots to sit beside her. 

She’d hired him because of _that_. The knowledge feels like a falling stone, pinning her in place. She should have known better.

Her fingers drum on the canteen in her hands. She puts it down, but she still can't look at him. “What do you want, Jun?”

His voice is hushed. “There’s something I need to tell you and--”

Mara shakes her head. “You don’t need to. It’s fine. Doesn’t make a difference to me. You’re...different, and your past...I don’t care." She twists her hands a bit. "Because you're right. Things are different." She swallows. "When I mentioned what your droid showed me, I didn't mean it like that. I swear. But I can't keep you on.”

“If it's the credits, I don’t need them," he interrupts emphatically. "I don't. I like flying with you. It’s never been about the credits.”

The anonymity. Mara thinks of the comms he makes when he goes planetside. Every single time. Plenty of other employers operate based on a strictly need to know basis. He can get that easily.

“I’m glad you kissed me.” 

The statement is so unexpected her head snaps in his direction.

“ _I_ wanted to.” There's trepidation when he continues, a blush traveling up his cheeks. “But you don’t like surprises. I know that, and I...I want to get to know you better.”

For a second she can't think of any response, then finally happens on, “This is a shavit time for this,” because she can't think of anything else.

Jun leans back. “Any other time it’s just business. Credit transfers. The job.” He lets out a small laugh. “And you’ve just fired me.”

Mara looks off to the dark of the tunnel. If she doesn't answer maybe the matter will drop. She won't have to do anything, it'll just go away on its own.

“You never told me how you got the _Fire_. Only that you didn’t buy her.”

This is safer. Normal. “I did tell you. She was a gift. I helped a rich businessman’s daughter. She gave it to me.”

His eyebrows raise. “Some help that must have been.”

Mara straightens up. Fine. “She was kidnapped. Some Drach'nam crime lord took her to his slave pits. Grabbed me too a while later. I got us both out. She was grateful. That’s it.” She wants to stand up and pace, at least wring her hands some more. She allows herself to do neither.

“Let’s start over.”

She startles at the non sequitur like it's a sprung trap. “What?”

He straightens up. "That's what I want. We get out of here and start over. No credits. No contract."

She flashes him a pinched look. "And do what?"

“Same thing we’ve been doing...except...”

“Except?”

“Except you kiss me.” He shrugs. “Sometimes I kiss you. I have it on good authority that's what having a relationship is like.”

Mara laughs in spite of herself, half in disbelief. It might be the worst line she's ever heard, and she's heard some terrible ones. This is all even more bizarre than their earlier discussions on the supernatural.

"A relationship?" 

"Sure. This is one kind of a relationship." He gestures to both of them. "I want to try another." He meets her eyes. "I think we fit well together. I like spending time with you. I don't care about credits...but I don't think that's the issue, is it?"

The even certainty in his words makes them difficult to brush off, the fact that she'd have some connection to those who did this to him, and he simply doesn't care. If it were her, she'd be nauseated. She is nauseated. How can he not be?

"You don't know me," she mumbles.

Jun stops, opens his mouth about to say something then closes it. He nods instead. "That's what I just said. I want to...and I'd like you to get to know me too."

She should be satisfied with her freedom, the _Fire_. She shouldn’t want anything else. She should be grateful with what she has. She should be cautious. So many things could go wrong. Haven't they already?

What lies before her are more solitary stretches of space.

She’s sick to death of being cautious.

He touches her hand lightly. “What I see in you...” He takes a breath as if he’s readying for a plunge. “I--”

She kisses him.

Like the first time, it starts as a fleeting touch, not even a real kiss. It becomes one when he draws closer, his lips against hers, his hand lifting to her lower back. And this time, she can’t feel aghast at it. Why not here, now? She hears nothing outside anymore. They’ll get to the settlement, grab a speeder, fix the _Fire_ and be on their way. She won’t have to let him go. Just the opposite. There's no need to dig up the past. She's already paid for it.

Her hand finds his jawline again and folds over it. She turns her head and he pulls away into another teasing brush of his lips against hers, it feels like he’s coaxing her to more, and she obliges with a full kiss, thumb rubbing over his grainy cheek, stubble scratching the pad.

For a while the kisses are like that, unhurried and soft. His hand finds her other at her side and his fingers slide across the back of her palm. When she shifts and turns her head, the kiss drifts by the corner of her lips, low on her cheek. It might speak to how inexperienced she is in all this that she’s vaguely aroused. The thought is enough for her to pull away. Nervousness inches into her, a sense of the precariousness of everything. 

Nothing good comes out of wanting too much.

“What is it?” he whispers.

But Jun could have sold her out dozens of times. Stolen from her. She trusts her instincts. She does.

“If it doesn’t work?” It’s such an ordinary concern. She lets the hand on his cheek fall away. “Between us.”

His thumb still rubs over the back of her other palm. “Seems less risky than getting shot at by sec.”

She makes a chastising sound. 

His voice goes lower. “Your ship. Ask me to leave and I will.” He nears more, his forehead by her temple, breath warm against her cheek. “I hope you won’t.”

She doesn't want to. It's as simple as wanting Jun beside her, for now for tomorrow, and the day after, wanting that ease between them she's never thought she could have with anyone. It's as simple as wanting to give herself over to his kiss now. It's as simple as wanting to believe that with this, her past is over and done with. A complete break. What else could this be?

He kisses her again. This one is different. His tongue touches her lower lip gently and her mouth parts. The kiss is still gentle, but the back of her neck tingles at the press of his tongue against hers. It's the kind of kiss to make her squirm. His hand falls just under her ear and the touch makes her break away with a gasp. 

Jun’s fingers graze just over her jaw as he ventures, “I’d--I’d like to call you by your first name.”

Mara fights not to look away. The name she goes by now lives largely in flimsies and licenses. She’s never cared about it one way or another. It’s a placeholder. She’s content enough to be the _Fire_ 's captain. But maybe she can try to be something else too. 

“My first name?" she asks slowly. "Karrinna?”

Mara feels him startle as if he didn’t expect that. “That’s your first name? Really?”

She doesn’t want to lie. She will if she has to. “It...it wasn’t the name I was born with, if that's what you mean...I don’t know the name I was born with. I was given another later, and I... wanted something new. I chose Karrinna after I got the _Fire_.”

He waits a long time before asking, “Any particular reason?”

She shakes her head. “Sounded ordinary. Forgettable. Never much liked standing out.” 

Jun smiles a little. “The _Fire_ isn’t a forgettable ship.”

She tilts her head. “She can be.”

He slides her braid over her shoulder. “I don't think you are either.”

She rolls her eyes. “You don't have to feed me a line.”

He makes a small noise of protest and drops his head to her neck, nuzzling along her shoulder. She brings her hand to stroke the back of his neck. He keeps his hair shorter than most smugglers she’s come across. She wonders now if it's a ex-military thing.

“And the jade from _Jade’s Fire_? Where does that come from?” he asks against the hollow of her throat.

She flinches and he draws away. She pulls his mouth to hers not wanting him to think it was something he did.

“It’s a moon. In the Colonies,” she says after she breaks the kiss. It’s not really a lie.

It takes him a few minutes. “Loronar?" His eyes widen. " Jade Moon. The shipyards.”

Mara flashes him a shaky smile. “You know it?”

He hesitates. “Been there. A while ago.”

Of course. Loronar was the site of some military campaign or other, but Mara closes her eyes and lets him kiss all her misgivings away. While his lips are on her, while his hands slide down her sides she forgets of screams, mines, creatures, credits, and the abysmal loneliness of space, the way it can feel like another kind of cell.

She can just wraps her arms around him, ignoring the panicky feeling that wells up. If it's just like staring down a precipice, then it's just a matter of not looking down.

Mara closes her eyes and buries her face into his neck. That feeling shuffled away, she wants him even closer, splays her palm over his chest and slides it down, hearing his breathing change as it drifts down his stomach over his clothes, slides down between his legs and cups him. His hips bump forward against her hand as his breathing grows ragged. She can imagine he wants her just as much as she does him and it makes her shiver. For how long? She can't even say for herself.

Jun opens his mouth to draw air and she closes the distance between them with a kiss that veers from what came before, nothing soft about it, down to the nip he leaves on her lower lip. It leaves her aching to feel his skin against hers, so much so she tugs down the zipper of her flightsuit, pulls away to push it down, and rid herself of her tank. It's unpleasantly cold here, but Jun can remedy that. She sees no reason why they shouldn't see this between them through to its logical conclusion.

His hands settle on her waist, applying faint pressure. "Wait, I think--"

Mara stops. Is she being too desperate? But his hands don't move from where they are. He struggles to meet her eyes, in a way that makes it clear he's as caught at she is. But he repeats, “I-I think we should talk.”

"About what?" All that effort is irritating, and she seizes his hands, pulling them up to her breasts. 

His throat works as he swallows and there, his eyes do drift down to his hands. "My...ah...background."

There's nothing _less_ she wants than to go over sordid histories. That's not what this is about at all. She presses his hands into a warm squeeze, they feel as amazing against her as she'd thought they would. This is better. "You hold mine against me?"

Jun makes a garbled sound in the back of his throat, yanks his eyes back up. The pressure of her hands keeps his where they are, but he's not trying to pull them off her either. "What?"

His reaction calls a smile from her. "You know about me already."

"Yes," he murmurs.

She leans forward to kiss him with all the conviction she feels. "So your background -- I don't care. None of it matters."

The words hit the mark, thankfully, and Jun drifts a hand up her neck as he returns the kiss. After, his hand flattens over her sternum, thumb tracing the hollow of her throat. His eyes set on her as he slides his palm down and to the side, covering her breast, thumb circling over her nipple. The caress sends a pleasant tingle through her, but it’s the flick of his eyes to her face, a mix of longing and hunger that makes her restless, makes her lean forward to kiss him hard.

Jun’s hand lifts to her cheek as he pulls back enough to turn the kiss slow and thorough. The air is short in her lungs when he moves away to brush his lips along her neck. His mouth lowers between her breasts, a hand drifting over one and her back arches, his other hand lowers between her legs over her underwear and she gasps, hips rolling against the heel of his hand.

“Good like this?” he whispers against her lips.

She nods. “Better without clothes.”

Jun pulls his hand away. It’s an awkward thing to break off and get the bedroll with her clothing half off. Off the corner of her eye she sees Jun getting rid of his clothing and tells herself it's too much to stare, but he doesn’t give her a chance to do that either once the bedroll is out and they’re both undressed. He chooses instead to sweep her into another kiss as he drops down onto it and pushes her onto her back, feathering kisses along her collarbones, his hands skimming her stomach, her hips. When his hand slides between her legs, his touch only teases, despite the movement of her hips in search for more. She clutches at his arms as his fingers trace the seam of her and decides she’s done with teasing, urges him to his back so she can straddle him. 

Mara remembers his earlier hesitance and meets his eyes. “Okay or...?”

Pupils flared, all he says is, “Yes. Yes.”

Mara lowers herself down, taking him in, watching as his mouth parts for a breath and another, drinking in the raw wanting in his gaze. He squirms a little as she settles around his length, his abdominals dipping underneath her with his gasped out moan when she rolls her hips experimentally. The sound makes her move a little less hesitantly for a few moments before she's drawn to his lips and has to lean forward for an ungainly kiss.

Pressure gathers as she returns to a roll and a slide down and up of her hips, gripping at his shoulders. Just like she thought, she's not cold at all, not while his breathing goes unsteadier, his hand curving over her breast. Behind it, her own heart beats faster and faster, her movements grows rougher. Jun’s thrown back his head, free hand curled up tight on the bedroll beside them, and in the headiness of the moment she thinks she wants that hand on her too.

He opens his eyes, might be about to reach between them, but she grabs his hand, brings his index and middle finger into her mouth, sucks while she quickens her pace, balancing herself with the hand she still has gripping his shoulder.

“Fuck,” he groans out, eyes squeezing shut, and everything narrows to a burst of pleasure, wholly unexpected, leaving her shuddering her breaths. 

She drops down to his chest in a heap. That was...unusual. It's never been that fast and definitely not come out of nowhere like that. Must be what happens when it's been that long, she supposes. Since court, she guesses.

Mara has no interest in dwelling on that, and raises her head. “Much better entertainment than glowrod puppets.”

Jun himself has a half-confused, half-chagrined look on his face, she finds oddly appealing. "Fast. That wasn't...I'm sorry."

"No, don't be...worked for me." She leans up and kisses him. "I guess we were on the same frequency, huh?" 

"Yeah." His smile still looks tight and embarrassed. She drops her head to kiss down his chest, charmed. "Same...channel." 

Mara chuckles. "That's what frequency means." She punctuates it with the scratch of her teeth right over his nipple and is rewarded with a slight squirm. She leans up for another kiss, but he's distracted, and goes to nuzzle her neck instead.

She furrows her brows at him. "What is it?"

"Cheating," he mutters at her throat as his hands trail down her back, fingers stroking along her shoulders and arms. She can't make heads or tails of it, but she's content to let him pull away, scooting to drag his mouth down lower, leaving open mouthed kisses from her chest to her belly. While that's nice, she pulls him back up before long for more kisses, more of his lean body against hers, rolling to her side and curling a leg over his hip, wanting to wrap around him like magnetic cable.

He untangles himself too soon, but it's only to shift down once more, mouthing at her hip. She expects him to push her onto her back, but he pulls on her hip instead.

“Up." He slides a hand down her outer thigh, clearly meaning her leg. "Over.”

He smiles a sly smile she hasn’t seen before, pulls at her again. She slides the leg over, raising up onto her knees. There's some self consciousness that she's exposed right over him still with the excess of when she'd had him just minutes ago, but there's a flare of heat that overpowers it at the way he runs his hands along her leg, when he licks up the inside of her thigh, the end point a sucking kiss, and does the same with her other. She inhales sharply as he mouths at the same spot he'd kissed, then bites lightly, hands stroking up and down the back of her thighs. His hands slide up to mold over her ass, pulling her to lower herself on him and all she has mind for is his mouth against her, nose up against her clit, the flat of his tongue against her, the drag of his stubble scratching against her thighs.

The rest is an instinctive rocking of of her hips. She’s leaned forward to brace herself on her arms and hears the frenzied quality of her moaning as her hips push against his face. She feels the slightest pressure of his finger as he eases it inside her and her cries change over to deep moans, her climax jolting up her body, leaving her resonating with the pleasure of it, stretching far longer than before. 

Her legs feel weak after, heart rate high like she’s been fleeing as she drops on her side, taken aback at the intensity this time. He wipes his face, shifts up on the bedroll beside her, and reaches towards her just as she turns, her mouth meeting his briefly, the taste of her sharp on his lips. She has to draw away to lie on his chest because her heartbeat is too wild, and she can barely breathe. His hand traces the ridge of her spine gently as she settles down. 

“You’ll think it strange," Jun's words are muffled against her shoulder, "if I say I’ve been looking for you?”

She overrides an uneasy feeling attempting to intrude on her sated haze. He really _is_ terrible with words. This is, what? The third awkward line he's tried? Probably sounded better in his head. But that’s exactly it. In a galaxy of bottom lines and cost benefit workups, Jun’s the rare dreamer -- even after all that's marked on his skin. It's a cause for wonder.

"Let me guess." She raises her head to look down at him. "All your life? I'd think you were a fool." She softens the remark with a smile, rubbing along his arm.

He meets her eyes, worry crossing his face. "Just that?"

Mara fakes a loud put-upon sigh. "I already said you could stay." 

Jun's concern fades and he goes back to stroking over her back running his fingers across her shoulder blades. He shifts over her slightly, and his fingers trail down her cheek again, slide down to her collarbones. All the while he stares at her like her skin is the most fascinating thing he’s seen. She supposes she can relate, thinks of him at the river as she drifts her own palms along his biceps to his shoulders. 

His mouth is on her nipple then, the faint hint of teeth sending a crackle of heat through her, making her draw a hissing breath. He does the same to the other, tongue stroking across the peak. Pinpricks of heat continue to snake through her as he nuzzles against her skin, _how_ at this point, she has no idea, but she arches and he pulls away to ask, “This okay? Too much now?”

“Yes,” she breathes and it's the wrong answer; he's about to pull away when she yanks him back by the neck. "I mean no." She grunts out her frustration.

He chuckles then goes up to kiss her, messy like before, his lips wandering down by her jaw. His hands slide down making her gasp and shiver, even from that. He draws away at her hiss, when his fingers wander where she’s too sensitive. He doesn’t withdraw though, just drops his hands, fingers grazing over her thighs, and up tracing her folds, over her hips. “Better?”

Mara nods. A flush works itself anew over her at his caresses, the brush of his lips down her arms over her breast down her hips, until she's wriggling, pushing her hips, wanting more of him. His touch is more confident now, but still too diffuse. Impatient, she guides his fingers into her as she sucks at his lower lip, a whimper at the breathless feeling of them inside her, burning at the way his eyes lock on her.

He’s hardened again by her thigh, wet from before maybe now too. Her hand wanders down to stroke him, and he moans, voice gritty as he asks, "Can I..." 

She laughs, mostly in surprise he'd even ask. It's obvious he must simply _like_ to ask, makes it easy to whisper, "Please."

He drops a quick kiss to her lips before he shifts between her legs, a look of focus on his face as he pushes in that would make her laugh if this didn’t feel even better than before.

It’s slower this time, but it could just be that the arousal has built steadier, her nerves heightening with every thrust, but his rhythm is stuttery, uneven and he stops. Mara has no time to reflect before his hand slinks between their bodies, she shifts and it's where it needs to be, slightly off center, making her arch, tension winding. He thrusts again, a slight almost involuntary movement. Several more short thrusts become a rhythm, and with the stroke of his thumb, time stops as she reduces to cracking glass, pleasure rippling out. 

Mara feels his hand withdraw, feels the give of the bedroll's fabric as his hand comes down on it beside her head. A shift of his hips and he’s thrusting hard with groan, pace rough and unrelenting, even before the rush of her climax is over. It's too good, her fingers dig into his shoulders as she twists under him, and shockingly, her pleasure peaks again. She’s out of breath as the feeling recedes, the echoes of her cries making her cringe as she comes down. Jun has stilled above her, so she ignores her self consciousness in favor of just wrapping her arms around him. She won't have to let him go. The thought catches in her throat in a surge of emotion.

He slides beside her, limbs intertwined with hers, breaths harsh against her neck and murmurs shakily, "It's never...I've never...I'm very foolish...very--"

"Shhh," she interrupts before he no doubt ends with some awkward line or other, tightens her arms around him. "I'm glad I fired you."

Jun lets out a sound that could be a chuckle, except it sounds oddly dismayed.

As much as she she wants to stay curled up on the bedroll with Jun, reality won't let her linger too long. Mara finds herself cataloguing that she'll probably be feeling all of this tomorrow, down to the stubble burn on her thighs. They're probably both in need of a wipe down too. One of them should keep watch. She can't bring herself to regret Jun's timing though; this between them has been the only good thing to come of out this damn job.

Jun exhales and presses his forehead against her shoulder. “Get some sleep. I’ll take the first half.” 

She furrows her brow at him, even as she appreciates his reluctance. “You’re sure?”

He nods resignedly. “You had first watch yesterday.”

"Okay." Mara waits a few seconds and then with a quiet groan pushes herself to sit up and go to her pack for the sanitary kit. 

“Cap--Karrinna," Jun calls out. "I'm --” 

She glances at him from over her shoulder stops and finds his eyes trailing down her back. His gaze is back on hers with a flustered, almost horrified expression, and she quickly turns back to the kit. 

It takes her a second to figure it out what that was about. Usually interrogator droids leave no marks, but occasionally the compound injected into the spine causes a reaction, or perhaps a specific compound is intended to cause a reaction. Sometimes in a human it takes the form of a raised mark in a prisoner’s lower back, just beside the spine. Bacta doesn’t heal it. She hasn't seen it in a while given it's location. That he could recognize it doesn’t surprise her given his own set of scars. Maybe he's seen them on someone else. A comrade. A friend.

“I’m...I'm happy you reconsidered,” he finishes.

Mara cleans up and smiles at him as she hands him the kit, and goes for her clothes. She senses he wants to ask about the mark, can even guess the direction of the question. Why should she, a former imperial, bear the marks of an interrogator droid? The answer is hardly heroic.

It calls to mind something she heard from an old timer when she started. He'd been a rare species smuggler, and had gone on and on about transporting slitherettes, a delicate operation apparently. Too much heat could disorient the cargo, he'd said, cause them to lose their minds. Stress one of them snakes too much, and the next thing you know, it's turning it's fangs on its own tail and making a bloody mess trying to rip itself apart. Mara wonders now if that isn't a mark of latent disease.

In any case, Jun doesn't ask and she's grateful. He smiles again, if a bit warily, and the memory dissipates into nothing as she watches him finish zipping up his flightsuit. He pats the bedroll and Mara goes to lie back down, looking up to where he sits next to her. 

"And the Fire?" he asks after a moment."From _Jade's Fire_ , where's that from?"

"I don't know...sounded good." She feels herself flush and looks away.

"So you named her."

Mara nods. "I did. Used to be the _Winning Gamble_." Jun makes a face and she laughs softly. "Yeah. That's what I thought, too."

"She's amazing," he says after a moment. "The _Fire_. Fast but not showy fast. Efficient." He lifts his head as he leans back as if calling it to mind. "Comfortable but not frilly. And that kick to her with that targeting system. Not what I'd expect from a luxury yacht. I knew she was something once I stepped inside the cockpit." He looks down at her, eyes dancing. "Everything just looked right."

Mara smiles. What captain doesn't like hearing their ship lavished with praise? But she's warmed more at the enthusiasm in Jun's voice. He talks like someone who lives and breathes ships, and there she thinks of his skills in flying, nothing short of prodigious.

"You want one someday?" she finds herself asking. "A ship. Like the _Fire_."

"At one point?" His smile goes boyish. "I would have done anything for one."

"And now?"

He gives a slight shake of his head. "Those aren't the kinds of things I want anymore."

Mara closes her eyes. There's a way his words, and even his silences lodge within her and draw her close, fissuring through her caution; she can't understand, much less explain it. It's easier to turn her mind to their situation, to consider that she has yet to hear a roar or those monstrous footsteps. Maybe that thing doesn’t venture where they are. They might just be out of here in two days and then...she isn’t sure. Obroa-skai again perhaps. They can figure it out.

She hears Jun shut down the glowrod, what he'd said and what he didn't soft and bright between them. As she drifts off, she wishes he’d touch her, even half gone, the thought twinges. She's pathetic and uncertain. Surely she wasn’t always like this.

But there’s the slightest ghosting of his fingers by her cheek, then his hand resting high and sure on her back. A vague sense of deja vu uncurls from it, but all it does is ease her into sleep. 

\-- 

_“Everything you love will betray you.”_

_She asks, “Everything, master?”_

_“Everything.”_

_A pause. “Even you?”_

_“Especially me.”_

_The voice shifts, becomes a woman’s._

_“It's your cooperation that we would have, Mara Jade.”_

_A wire month’s wings flap. Not one, many. Their dark shadows eat through the Fire’s hull._

_The scream of thousands of beings._

_Or maybe it’s just her own, and after, she lies gasping in a pool of dark, sticky--_

Mara wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editing's a bear. I'll try to be done end of the week, but the final part might be up next week. These parts are enormous. Happy Halloween, everyone!
> 
> More canon/non canon notes:
> 
> 1\. That stone field is loosely modeled after [this](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-ww32KKeQQ4o/UXeiT6MOKyI/AAAAAAAAnwA/SbXgb-iXWVg/shilin-stone-forest-3%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800), the Shilin (stone forest) National Scenic Area in China. 
> 
> 2\. [Jundland Wastes](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jundland_Wastes/Legends). Interesting quote: "In the native parlance, "Jundland" meant 'No Man's Land.'" So can Jund mean "no man?" I find that possibility really cool, idk. Also Mara [would never use 'Karrinna' as an alias now, would she](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Karrinna_Jansih)? Were they giving prizes for double consonants in EU?
> 
> 3\. [High human Culture](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Human_High_Culture), a legends example of [fantastic racism](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasticRacism). 
> 
> 4\. [Jade Moon](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jade_Moon)
> 
> 5\. For those who don't know the history of the _Jade's Fire_ \-- [here](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jade_Solitaire)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, the length of the parts was making editing a total slog, so we're back to smaller chunks. I tried, guys, I tried. :-(

__  
__  
_Dig a hole_  
_Fireworks exploding in my hands_  
_If I could paint the sky_  
_Would all the stars then shine a bloody red?_  


  


  


The glowrod comes on at one of the dimmer settings. Jun’s hand is steadying at her shoulder.

“You were having a nightmare.”

“Oh.” Mara tries not to be too embarrassed as she sits up shakily, trying to orient herself. She checks her chrono. “At least it’s time to switch. I hope I wasn’t too...annoying.”

He shakes his head, the touch changing over to a soft squeeze. “No, of course not.”

Mara gives him a small smile, the events of just a few hours ago coming back to her. They’d slept together and...she darts her eyes to his.

“You’re not having second thoughts about keeping me on, are you?” His tone is teasing but she can pick up some concern. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

It warms her more than it should. “No, no. I...”she trails off, not knowing how to phrase it. “I don’t deviate from a course.” She almost cringes at the metaphor, but Jun’s face brightens to radiance and her chest squeezes.

“Okay." He slides his hand from under hers to cup from her neck to her cheek, leaving her nerves tingling. “I’m glad.”

She smiles and finds her footing. “You can show me how much once we’re back at the _Fire_. Now get some rest.”

Jun beams, trailing his hand down her arm, ending with a final squeeze of her hand before they switch places, he taking the bedroll, she sitting up beside him. She turns off the glowrod. It never takes him long to nod off.

Some stretch of time after it’s obvious he’s sleeping more fitfully than he had the night before. Mara wonders if to wake him several times when she feels him thrash beside her, more when it starts including panicked moans. One goes ragged and high, and she turns towards him, alarmed, a chill creeping down her spine.

“Jun,” she calls gently, tamping on her disquiet. “Jun.”

“No-no-no-no.” He doesn’t quiet and she puts a soft hand on his shoulder. Should she turn on the glowrod? She doesn’t want to jar him awake. It’s not time either.

“You’re dreaming, okay? It’s okay. You’re dreaming, Jun.”

He settles, but only slightly. A second later, his voice rings out in the dark, a sleep slurred mumble in the quiet of the tunnel.

Mara draws her hand back.

Every nerve suddenly stands on end.

Her heart starts to pound furiously. _What the kriff?_ She moves away a few feet.

Nothing, she tells herself after a moment. Absolutely nothing. She misheard him. People can say strange, nonsensical things when having nightmares. It's not worth thinking about. Who knows what Jun's heard _her_ say in her sleep, especially after she'd thought she heard screaming earlier in the evening among the stones. She'd still thought she was still hearing it when they’d climbed down here. It's the same thing. She’s on edge and her imagination is making up all sorts of things.

This kriffing place. This shavit job.

The passing of minutes brings more evenness. Jun’s nightmare has passed and he’s calm now, the even sound of his breathing lulling. Mara feels just as foolish as she had earlier with what she’d thought she heard. He’s just dreaming. He’d mumbled something incoherent and her imagination had gone wild. She returns to her spot beside the bedroll.

The alarm on her chrono sounds some time later and Jun groans softly. She turns on the glowrod as he sits up and passes a hand through his face. She tells herself to stand up immediately and get her pack, but lingers staring at him.

It takes him a bit longer to kick off the grogginess, probably because of the broken sleep. She can sympathize.

“Can’t wait to leave this place,” he mumbles, stretching.

“Me too.”

His eyes focus on her and his lips form a bright smile, just as shinning as the one he’d given her earlier. She feels even more foolish.

She smiles back at him and catches herself. That’s enough for indulging. She goes for her pack and begins her climb up the ladder. The movement reminds her that she’s sore, but it’s far from unpleasant, the memories from last night warming her even in the cool of the early morning.

They breakfast on ration bars halves as they walk back to that area with the stones. Her stomach still grumbles its unhappiness. It’s a good thing they’ll reach the settlement today.

Jun is back to quiet. She can almost feel his concern as they broach the area with the jagged stones. It looks less forbidding by morning light even if it’s overcast today.

“The settlement should be past these.” Mara looks around the stone-lined terrain. It’s much hillier here than in the forest, the terrain extremely uneven. “Not too far at least.”

“These stones...” Jun frowns beside her.

“They’re odd, right?”

He reaches out to trace one of the cracks within them. 

“Wait,” she extends a warning hand, “I wouldn’t--”

He hisses and pulls his hand away. More alarmingly, he teeters a little.

“Jun!” Mara wraps an arm around his back to steady him. “Jun!”

He’s squeezed his eyes shut.

“What is it?”

She calls his name again.

“I’m okay.” Jun straightens up. He’s pale and his face is tight, breathing grown ragged. She’s not comfortable withdrawing just yet.

“Loud,” he says under his breath. “So loud.”

Mara raises her head. She can’t hear anything and stifles a shudder.

“What’s loud?” she heard the strain in her voice and suppresses the impulse to move away. “What’s loud, Jun?”

She feels him regulate his breathing. “Jun.”

“I’m okay,” he finally says with a wince, pulling away slightly.

“You don’t look okay.”

“Here, last night,” he begins. “You...felt something strange, right? From the stones.”

Mara swallows. “Just imagining things." Too many stories in her head. "It was fine.”

“What was it?”

She shakes her head forcing a smile. “Nothing. Just a migraine.” A chill comes over her at his scrutiny, because she's no longer thinking about the voices she'd heard before she'd gone down to the tunnels. She's thinking of him in the dark, of calling his name while he thrashed in the throes of a nightmare, and his sleep slurred answer.

_“Who’s Jun?”_

That's not worth thinking about. Mara quickly brings herself back to the present and forces a laugh. “A migraine, that’s all.”

Jun doesn’t reply. He’s staring off into the distance. 

“Let me guess. Your head hurts.” To his inquisitive look, she adds, “Neither of us are sleeping all that well. Or eating well. On top of the hiking and watching out for that thing. It’s our third day of this. That would do a number on anyone.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve had this many nightmares,” he murmurs as if to himself. His gaze comes back to her. “You?”

Mara thinks back. “I don’t frequently go trudging through forests sleeping in mine shafts to avoid mutated rancors. Do you?” She goes for her pack. “Let me get you a painkiller.”

Jun stops her with a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine. Rather save it.” Instead she whips out the half of ration bar he’d left the night before. She’d been stupid to let it slide.

“Eat.”

He gives her a small smile, but it fades when he meets her eyes and sees her solemn expression. Wordlessly, he takes the offered food and she goes on ahead.

“Karrinna?” he ventures tentatively, after he’s done.

“Mm?”

“What do you know about Jedi?”

She flashes him an odd look as she grabs and puts away the wrapper of the ration bar. “Why?”

He pauses, finishing the second half. “Curious.”

She sighs. “I don’t want to get into a discussion about religion. I...respect that you...have faith.”

“You don’t believe in the Force."

“I believe,” she starts carefully, “that people want to believe in something. Something better than what came before." She stares off at the fields of rocks. She should stop there, but inexplicably keeps going, “People believed in the Empire because they thought it’d be better than the Old Republic. That’s what was taught, right?” But the Empire was corrupt too, she continues inwardly, so that belief didn't amount to much in the end.

Jun's expression is still drawn. “And Jedi?”

Mara shrugs. He must really put a lot of faith in them to be thinking about them this often. Maybe he's thinking of the history here, that ancient war. “Same thing, no?”

She can tell he doesn't like that reply, but all he follows up with is, “Do you believe that now?”

“I don’t know. None of it has anything to do with me.” It's better that way. Annoyance seeps into her and she waves a hand. “Whatever you believe is fine, Jun.” 

Mara walks faster, past one of the distant stones she can see a massive building’s silhouette, bulbous from among the outgrowths of jagged stones, which are growing less and less.

“I think--”

“Over there!” She rushes ahead towards it. “That’s a processing plant, the power plant beside it. The settlement can’t be too far. Just over this hill.” 

The buildings have domed roofs and an enormous storage tank and cooling tower behind them. A massive need to see the settlement wells up, and she breaks into a run.

“Wait!” she hears Jun shout after her, but she climbs and climbs to top of the hill, until she's standing at a distance from the processing plant and the power plant. 

Below them on the slopes of the hills, Mara surveys the town, what's left of it lies scattered like debris. She was stupid enough to hope it could be otherwise. 

“Karrinna." 

“It’s gone,” she murmurs. "All of it."

Jun doesn’t reply and she looks at him, still too pale under the milky white sky, clouds thick enough to bathe the late morning in a dull gray. She should have insisted he eat last night, but underneath something else bubbles...

_Who's Jun?_

Her unease ticks up. 

Mara buries it in words, plans. “Even if people are gone, we might find the fuel cells we need. Maybe even a speeder we can use to take it back. The map said there was a tunnel entrance under the processing plant, so we have shelter if we have to spend the night.” She resumes walking.

Jun catches up to her. “What is it?”

She doesn’t know why she’s so shaken. None of this is anywhere close to the worst she’s experienced. Things are not dire at all. She's fine. Jun's fine. They didn't even hear that creature last night. The knowledge doesn't stop a creeping disquiet just scratching, scratching at her. All they've been doing is hiding. 

He exhales. “I feel...weird about this place too.”

She summons a smile. “Safe to say neither of us is at our best, but maybe we can find some more food.” 

He flashes her a borderline incredulous look briefly before he scans out to the torn landscape before them. They continue on and into the limits of the settlement where the remains of battered buildings cluster together. Plastoid from the crumbling buildings, fallen walls, bent metal, glass, pieces of machinery and other wreckage lies strewn along their path, obscuring what Mara guesses used to be the main thoroughfare based on its width. Whatever walls are left standing, are gutted and blackened. It’s hard to imagine what the area looked like when it was still standing.

“How long ago you think that thing did this?” All of the wreckage appears much more recent than the Clone Wars, much newer than the mines.

“It’s too much.” The note of apprehension in Jun's voice makes Mara stop.

“You don’t think it was that thing.” Even without the shake of his head, Mara knows. This kind of devastation is far beyond one creature, even one as large as that one. The settlement must have housed several hundreds, maybe even up to a thousand.

"The history," Jun's expression is troubled, "talks of the Dark Jedi turning the battlefield into a kind of laboratory, experimenting with all sorts of creatures."

She's about to dismiss that too when she catches sight of a dirty, cracked sign on the ground, announcing VerunaCorp Processing, probably from the plant a few miles back. Her stomach drops and Jun’s head snaps towards her. There's no need to pull out myths about ancient evils.

“This colony belonged to VerunaCorp. A Corporate Sector holding. If the miners accidentally dug out something dangerously toxic -- toxic enough to create...mutations..." There's an awful taste in her mouth.

She can almost hear the screams she imagined last night and a bone chilling cold rattling through her, forces herself to keep walking, feeling Jun’s eyes on her. 

“Maybe the workers called their bosses for help." _Begged_. Her voice sounds strange in her ears, “this is what they got.” 

_That’s_ what feels like a punch to the gut, the betrayal of it, how it can come from _anywhere_ , even close, though Mara knows no one _believes_ in the Corporate Sector. Most unlucky to be born in its territory just had no choice. 

She thinks of wire moths in butterfly cover, and wants nothing more than to leave this planet. Mara takes a step and misses her footing, almost careening forward if it weren’t for Jun’s arm reaching for her. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she mutters.

His grip at her arm eases, but its touch is there. “Nothing’s wrong with you. Whatever happened here was horrible.” A chill goes down Mara's spine, but his voice is gentle when he continues, "Things like that...they leave echoes behind." He lifts his head to look around them, voice lowering to a murmur, "You can feel them like you can feel the wind."

Mara looks at him fixedly. More superstitious nonsense? She's hardly in the mood, and slips from his grasp to go on ahead.

It's high noon, but there’s no noise other than their footsteps. The forest tended to magnify every small cracking sound. In the open space of the remains of the settlement sound extinguishes as quickly as it came.

Most structures seem to have been supply and repair shops for mining droids and equipment, interspersed with a few eateries. They pass some half crushed landspeeders and look through them, but none of them are in any shape that they could be easily fixed. They stop at what seems to have been a general supply store and find some basic survival gear and some repair tools and material tossed all about the room under pieces of the walls and roofs. Mara goes towards the collapsed counter, passes a finger through a thick layer of dust, cleans it off on her flightsuit's leg.

She walks forward and through an open doorway that opens up to a workspace. There’s nothing there either other than a half repaired mining droid, a stool in front of it and tools and spare parts, blaster marks on the walls. She turns back to the main area. 

They haven't encountered any human remains thus far, but that doesn’t surprise her. The company probably incinerated the bodies, standard protocol when there's a biohazard concern.

Jun calls her from a few paces away. He’s dug out a box containing various food items, and she lowers her pack so she can shove the ration bars in. He also pulls out two dry mealpacks in sterile wrapping from the mass. 

“Just add water.” He flashes her a small smile. “Sor noodles.”

Mara eyes them reluctantly, but she’s in no position to turn them down. Sor noodles are blander than bland possibly the reason they can last as long as they do; the sauces usually compensate for it, not that she’s going to take her chances with condiments which generally have a shorter shelf life. After days of half ration bars though, plain noodles don’t sound like a bad meal. They eat at one corner of the shop. 

“My guess is that we should look up where their hangars are to find replacement fuel cells,” Jun says between bites.

Mara nods. “Going to be annoying.” At least with larger towns you could count on a central spaceport, but in outposts like this there were probably just private hangars scattered throughout. 

Jun finishes off his food. “At least that increases the chances of finding something standing.”

After they’re done, they walk out and into several streets over. Mara looks up the sky; the humidity’s rising, might rain. She hope it’ll hold off until they’re back at the _Fire_ or huddled underground.

The first hangar they find is in a sprawling building at the end of the block, the side wall of it shattered. There’s no landspeeder, but there’s a reasonably well equipped repair shop. After riffing through it for a while, there’s no sign of fuel cells the _Fire_ can use. They leave it behind and go back to the quiet wreckage-strewn streets.

The next hangar is not too far away and in a building in a better condition, only its plastoid roof torn up. It’s smaller than the first and has a Skipray blastboat in it. The ship appears to be in decent condition from the outside, but locked. Mara considers breaking into it, but decides to spend her time in the repair bay instead, scanning for fuel cells.

“There might not be the kind of tech we need in this backrocket planet.” They’re going to have to think of workarounds.

Jun pulls away from the storage compartment he’s poring through a few steps from her. “It might be faster to try to take battery cells instead of looking for fuel cells. I saw plenty at the last place.”

“That’s too low end. It won’t give us the energy we need.” Mara sits in front of the Skipray, trying to think things through. “We won’t lift to atmosphere with just battery cells.”

“We could,” Jun counters, “we’d just have to reroute all power to the engines. Forget the computer and nav.”

“That’s flying blind. I can’t do that.”

“I can.” He comes to sit beside her.

He could, Mara considers. He landed the _Fire_ blind. 

“We can keep looking, but the sooner we leave this place, the better. We just need to get out of the grav well. The energy expenditure in hyperspace is nil.” Jun lays a hand on her arm. “I won’t let anything happen to her.”

Mara looks at him. She’s eager to leave this ghost town herself and all the bad memories it's conjured up. Leave this whole mistake behind. 

His arm slides around her shoulders. “A jump and we’ll be back at Obroa-skai. Just a couple of days.” 

She leans against his shoulder and closes her eyes. The symbol on the coin rises up in her memory, dredging up a wave of impotent anger. “We have to leave the area.”

“Hey," Jun pulls away staring into her face. "It’ll be okay." He smoothes back her hair. "We needed the change anyway." His expression shifts to hopeful. "We...we can go coreward. I have contacts.”

She bites her lip. “The Core is too densely patrolled. It’s too hard.” 

“I have contacts,” he repeats. “I can get us new transponder ids.”

Mara blinks. “The New Republic.” That’s what the Rebellion became. She looks away. Is she on any wanted lists? At one time she thought she wouldn't be, that _no one_ knew who she was, but Isard had, clearly...Who knows who else she told, especially if they worked her up before her execution. “You have friends.”

Everyone talks.

Jun nods and the arm around her tightens it's hold. “No one will ask any questions. We can make double what you make with these runs. Triple even. And it’s safer.”

She moves away. “The catch?”

“What catch?”

“Sounds too good to be true.” She stands and gets a crate, moving towards the battery cells at one corner of the repair bay. “If it’s that easy why didn’t you stay?”

His voice is strained. “I was...looking for something.”

She continues packing cells, turning her attention back to the parts. They’re going to need as many battery cells as they can find.

“Something you couldn’t find in the Core? What?” she grunts. “Rundown spaceports, pirates, a lag in the HoloNet?”

“It _is_ home,” he points out wryly.

“And now that you’ve had your fix of that you want to go back.”

She raises her head when he doesn't reply right away. He's gone for a crate himself and brings it over. “The more I think about being targeted the less I like it.” Some reluctance creeps up under his words as if he's loathe to broach the subject, “That coin...”

Mara forces herself to shrug. Running again. Running and hiding. That's all it's been since Isard. “Happens all the time. The big organizations are greedy.”

Jun’s expression darkens. “What if it’s not a threat at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“Or not just that,” his eyes grow murky, “What if it’s what you said...an invitation?”

Mara snorts. “I didn't mean it like that. I said Black Nebula took it as an invitation...to blast those Zann Consortium goons out of the system." She can't help the incredulous note in her voice. "You're talking about what?...Some kind of recruitment thing?"

He's still serious and she can't help a dark laugh. "Funny way to go about it. 'Live through our sabotage and then we’ll talk'? Like it's some sort of initiation? No.” She shakes her head. "Smuggling organizations are straight shooters." 

“Yeah...” His eyes don’t sharpen. “I just think it’s best to get the Headhunter and be as far away from here as possible.”

She sighs. The Headhunter. Without this job she won’t have the credits to get it back. Letting it go is out of the question. It's part of the _Fire_. “I’ll have to see about that.”

His expression clears. “You’re not paying me anymore. Use that.”

Mara makes a face.

He makes a tiny frustrated noise. “The quicker we can leave this sector, the better.” He goes back to moving the cells back into the Skipray.

Mara stays where she is, pondering it. The possibility of returning to the Core something seemed so distant after her escape, but Isard and them are gone. If the current government has no idea she exists...if she's not in any war criminal wanted list...if they get those transponder codes...

She stops herself and brings her focus back. Too many 'ifs'. They need to make it off the planet first. 

They pack the two crates and Mara looks again to the Skipray. “Be so much easier if we could just load them in that. Makes me wish your astromech was here.”

“We could try to hotwire it.”

Mara looks at her chrono. Mid-afternoon. “It’s getting late.”

“A Skipray would be a lot safer to bring in the cells than a simple speeder. Faster, given crossing the forest. It can get more altitude." Jun cocks his head, staring in its direction. "I think it’s worth it.”

Mara considers it and nods. She puts down the box of cells and walks towards the Skipray with her multitool.

\--

Neither she nor Jun are that great at hotwiring, Jun muttering he hasn’t done it in years, but about an hour later they manage to get inside the cabin. She’s slightly better at slicing though hardly a pro, but she’s able to get through the first access codes and take a look at its status and logs.

“I got the scan running,” she says coming down to where Jun’s grouping more of the battery cells. “It's got the requisite three fuel pods full and ready to go, but the log says it spends them too easily, might need a new fuel needle. Probably why it's in the shop.”

Jun nods and gestures to the workshop area along the back. “I’ll take a look at the current needle, maybe it's nothing critical. Are you done with the rest of the general systems check?”

“Most of it, but nothing else flagged." They both go inside the ship, Jun heading over to the engine room. She finishes her initial check and wanders down there for an update, finding him on his back waist deep in an access panel.

He shifts out with a hydrospanner in one hand and the Skipray's rifle-long fuel needle in the other. “I’d need more time to figure out what’s wrong with the needle, but I think it's got some bad wear and doesn't control the amount of fuel well -- shoots it out too fast.” 

Mara furrows her brow. That could damage the spark plug. “The spark okay?"

“I think so. Some delays, but the ignition lag should be easier to deal with than the pressure with which it's pushing out the fuel. That's the real problem.”

“Well, hang tight. I’ll see if they have a spare for it.”

She goes back out to the workshop and looks over the parts there. If the techs diagnosed the problem before the disaster, chances were the part they were going to switch out would be there, a needle is basic as far as parts go. Mara picked up the crate labeled ‘fuel injector’, and brought it back just as Jun set the old needle beside him. She swapped it out, leaving the old one at the workshop table and went back in.

“I replaced it,” Jun calls through the intercom a bit later. “You might want to run the engine systems check again to make sure everything’s working right.”

"All right," she replies.A few diagnostic scans after, she’s back in the engine room. “I think we're set.”

Jun nods and tidies the area. After they take the tools out to the workshop area, he touches her back.

“We should close it up and eat. Tomorrow we can bring the cells from the other hangar -- should end up being eight crates of it. That should be more than enough to power up the hyperdrive for the jump. What we have now is just enough for about two weeks on sublights, so we're in decent shape.”

Mara straightens up and cracks her neck. They wash up at the nearby ‘freshers and she digs through her pack for their dinner.

\--

Some polystarch with protein paste later they are back out on the deserted streets. Rain gathers in the air as mist, clouds a gloomy blue-gray in the distance giving the late afternoon a bleak cast. 

Mara thinks back to the creature's towering dark shape. How had that thing escaped a full-on attack by Corporate Sector cleaners? Had they just missed one? Her blaster had been useless. No choice but to run.

She turns her attention to the domed structure of the processing plant and the squarish building of the power plant that line the horizon, the hills behind them, not too far. As they follow the path back out to the main thoroughfare, a half standing cantina comes into view, judging by the dilapidated remains of the bar visible through the chewed up walls. Mara sets towards it impulsively, leaving her pack behind as she crunches through the debris underfoot, heading towards the decrepit shelving in the back. 

“What are you looking for?” Jun's voice echoes behind her, confused.

Mara doesn’t answer, scanning through broken bottles and glasses, the bolt-chewed up pressure dispenser taps, crouches for a look at the cabinets, hearing Jun come over to where she is. 

“Ah-hah!” She grabs the bottle of Seikosha whiskey and raises it. “It’s shavit, but I can’t afford their Whyverns.” It’s such an idiotic joke, she can’t even believe she made it.

But Jun is grinning when she lifts her eyes to him. “Oh, Whyverns isn’t that great.” 

“It’s not hot chocolate.” She uncorks the bottle, raises her eyes to him and takes a swig. Seikosha is most definitely not smooth, but she welcomes the burn. It seems appropriate for now. 

He surprises her by pulling the bottle from her and takes a drink, grimacing. 

Mara can’t help the smile that comes over her face. She has to look away for a second.

His hand drifts to her back, warming her more than the liquor. She slides her hand over his, taking the bottle back and for a second she's elsewhere, not running and hiding, not looking over her shoulder. 

“To your stay on my ship.” She tips the bottle in his direction and takes a sip, offers it back with a flourish. 

Jun doesn’t take it, instead he sweeps her into a kiss. Her hands come around his neck as the kiss turns heated, deep. She presses herself against him, burning up with the knowledge of how his body feels against her, even if his hands haven’t moved from where they are at the middle of her back. She wishes them all over her. He breaks away, but they’re both short of breath.

“We should keep going,” he says, his hand leaving her back, coming to rest on her upper arm. 

Mara corks the bottle and puts inside the pack. Jun grabs her it this time, and they walk out again. His hand slides down from her elbow to her wrist, stopping to clasp her hand. 

As they near, she finds that the processing plant and the power plant seem to be in a far better state than most of the buildings in the settlement, the structures standing with no indication of blaster marks. This might have to do with the brunt of whatever happened being taken by the crushed duraplast walls surrounding both structures. The processing plant interiors are equally untouched, the glowrod revealing that its surfaces are dusty, but bear no marks of struggle. Seems like the place wasn’t targeted the way the rest of the settlement was. Maybe there was no one here to target when they came.

“We didn’t hear anything last night," she's moved to murmur. "Could be that thing doesn’t venture this far. I think we should stay in to be safe, but...”

Jun nods, but an edge of concern in his face is visible even by glowrod light.

They go through around the operating equipment at the center of the processing plant's long main floor, past the storage area with various shelves full of what Mara assumes are diagnostic instruments for the machines, and down the stairs. Three sets of stairs down, the area opens up to the entrance to the tunnels, a basement room where the duracrete of the walls disappears in favor of dark rock, much larger than the tunnels they’d been spending their nights at. 

Jun drops her pack, wandering around. Mara goes through her pack for her datapad for more readings on the underground section near them. Just a few yards away, her program reads a structure similar to a repulsor trackline, meant for guiding platforms usually loaded with droids and machinery to transport deeper into the tunnels. 

She’s about to mention it to Jun when she notices how on edge he seems. The set of his shoulders speaks of tension as he looks down the darkened corridor that leads to the mines.

“You okay?”

He makes an affirmative sound. After a moment, he looks to her. “It’s colder here.”

Mara tilts her head. “I guess...it’s all been cold to me. Barely notice it. We can just go back up. It'd be more comfortable and we're still protected.”

He doesn’t respond, but his arm slides across her shoulders when she approaches. It’s an easy silence between them, but Jun’s attention is still elsewhere. 

“You know,” she muses because it's starting to get to her too. “I thought the comms you did when we were downplanet might have been to someone...special.”

"I like to check in with my sister every so often," he says offhandedly. "We're close.”

That’s something that never occurred to her. “You have a sister?”

He turns to her and nods with a small smile. “Twin.”

“Really?” She’s having a hard time imagining it. A woman somewhere with his blue eyes and ash brown hair. It’s a bizarre thought.

“About that...” Jun grows serious and pulls away. “Karrinna, I need to tell you--”

Mara waves a hand. “I told you it doesn’t matter.” She wonders idly if twins are more common in human offshoots.

“No, it does...I think you should know--” He breaks off and his head snaps in the direction of the tunnel.

Alarmed at the shift in demeanor, Mara looks too, straining her eyes, but sees nothing. “What is it?”

“Something...here,” he mutters. Nothing is visible or audible, but she does a sense of impending danger thrums, a coiled up feeling of dread tightening the base of her spine.

“Let’s go up.” Her blood is beginning to pound. She grabs her pack.

Jun follows and they go back up to the main floor of the plant, walking towards the machinery in the center, a mass of floation machines, turbolizers and crushers. The alarm doesn’t go away, if anything it gets worse. They’re within a building, that should be fine. That thing can’t fit inside the tunnels, and they’d hear it if it was near. That’s the problem.

She can’t hear anything.

Mara flicks her wrist for her holdout. Her eyes dart in Jun’s direction. Why hasn’t he got his blaster out? And in the distance...

_tick tack tick tack_

From the stairs. Mara dives between the machinery, barely noticing Jun’s hand on her arm clasping her arm tightly. The clicking only gets louder, and something else...like the panting of an animal.

Maybe it’s her own breathing, too shaky and loud in her ears.

“What is it?” she whispers.

Jun pulls her to cover behind one of the bulky mining droids at one corner and turns his glowrod off. She follows suit. They wait there and after a minute, Mara gives into the impulse of looking towards the direction of the stairs. It doesn’t even matter. Mara can’t see much of anything without her glowrod, and with all this machinery between them. 

She looks to Jun beside her, knows he’s there by the press of his shoulder against hers, the warmth radiating from him. The dread hasn’t gone away though, and there’s an unbearable stretch of anticipation that strains every nerve.

“It’s not gone.” Her holdout in hand isn't comforting as she looks around them then back to the stairs, straining her eyes. All she sees are the dark shapes of machinery. Are they moving? No, they are not.

“It’s not,” Jun echoes softly.

There’s a yell itching to leave her throat at the interminable wait. She wants to stand up, aim her holdout--

Jun’s hand falls on her shoulder. “No.”

Her breathing goes even more ragged. She knows where the entrance is, just up ahead. “Can’t stay here.”

His voice is even. “Wait.”

“No,” she stands up, just as she hears more clicking. “We’re going.”

“No!”

_tick tack tick tack_

Mara breaks into a run, towards the door, only cognizant of Jun beside her, the thumping of their boots on the ground. The processing plant's main floor stretches for forever. It's a wonder she doesn't crash into anything, but finally plunges through it into the outside, turning on her glowrod. Rain pelts her immediately. While they were inside the weather must have taken a turn for the worse. Between the downpour and the dark, even with the glowrod, she’s briefly disoriented. 

“There!” she hears Jun shout, pulling her along and she finally realizes they're crossing the field separating the processing plant from the power plant. A nine foot tall three foot wide duraplast wall with chunks blasted out of it obstructs the entrance, but doesn't look too difficult to climb.

Off in the distance there’s a low rumble, a familiar trembling all around. 

Mara slowly looks up to the dark horizon. She can't see a thing, but icy dread washes over her.

"Come on!" Jun pulls her forward over the uneven shambles of the fence.

The rubble rumbles around them as they run into the squarish building.

Mara clenches her jaw as another tremble resounds through the air. She’s sick of running, sick of this planet, and whatever freak thing is hunting them, sick of waiting for it, avoiding it. 

Smaller than the previous building, most of its main floor consists of group of generators extend to the back, silent but undamaged. She wipes her face; her flightsuit is already soaked through. Beside her, Jun is equally drenched, the rainwater streaming in rivulets down his face, flightsuit dripping a puddle like hers.

“Where are you going?” Jun asks once they’re inside and she takes off, her glow rod raised to survey ahead of her. There has to be a basic maintenance room on this level. 

“I don’t want to hide anymore.” She spies a doorway and there can see several cleaning supplies. She clips her glowrod to her belt and digs through them in a frenzy, tossing bottles of cleaning solution and chemicals down in her search. She finally finds what she’s looking for, valephene, a cleaning rag, and several gas masks. Now she just needs a fuel, and dashes back with Jun in tow. "Can't stand it. It's all we've kriffing been doing--"

"I'll handle it."

The ground shakes again as she sprints towards the back of the generators, ignoring him. This is not time for his good intentions. 

“What are you doing?”

There’s always a fail safe, a secondary energy source for the generators. She finds a canister of pergasian fuel. Perfect.

“Our blasters don’t do shavit against that thing.” She fishes out the bottle of Seikosha uncorks it and empties about half of it. Seikosha, as it so happens, is a shavit ten-rate liquor, but extremely reactive in conjuction with combustive material. She wouldn't have grabbed it otherwise.

Jun’s hands are both at her shoulders exerting just enough pressure to keep her there and she looks up. “Stop--"

"Get out of here," she cuts him off, jerking away, and takes off her pack. "You need to get out of here. There's more that's flammable." She shoves one of the gas masks at him and crouches to pour the fuel into the bottle.

"Karrinna, no, I--”

Another shake. Louder this time. Closer as she straightens up, the bottle in hand.

“It’s after me." Jun's expression is resolute as he stands before her. “So I’ll deal with it.”

She can only look at him blankly. 

“I’m...a Jedi. Well,” he winces, “ _the_ Jedi. My name's Luke Skywalker. I should have told you.” His expression turns beseeching. "Everything but the name is true."

A part of her wonders if human offshoots are more psychologically delicate. The other part is all too aware that this means she has an extra problem in her hands. Kriff, she thinks. Kriff.

A pained look crosses his face. “You don’t believe me.” The look vanishes in favor of that previous resoluteness. “Just stay here. Please.”

But they’re out of time. a low thudding rises up follows by a sharp crack, a tremble beneath their feet. A loud roar makes the duracrete walls rattle. The ground jerks again and instead of a crack, a boom rings out debris going flying. That kriffing thing, Mara thinks, is bringing down the wall, and Jun is running _towards_ it. 

Mara stuffs the rag inside the bottle, hearing pieces of the wall crunch. She flicks her wrist for her holdout, and shoots at nearest control panel before putting it away. The panel fizzles and briefly lights up in flames before her. She pulls down her gas mask and passes the neck of the bottle with the rag in the mess of charred circuits, willing the flame to catch.

It does. 

The creature bellows. 

She turns as the creature dives forward for Jun who instead of rolling away, has jumped back, going for the pocket of his flightsuit. The creature lunges, Jun continuing to jump back, still reaching. Same stupid mistake.

“Jun! Get out!” she screams as she runs past him towards the creature and flings the bottle.

Glass shatters. A second. With a deafening boom, a ball of flame blooms before the beast, before her. From the gas mask, she sees a wall of red-yellow, feels herself flung back. As soon as her senses return, she rolls to her side, hands going to her head instinctively as she curls while debris rains down. 

In the next second, she's scrambling up with ringing ears, scanning for Jun. She can’t see him amid the smoke and flames. The beast comes into view roaring as the flames lick up its body, the sound making the whole of the floor tremble. The beast's side of the front end of the building is crumbling. Mara stumbles past the flaming beast and the torn out wall, out the way they came. Jun must have left. He _has_ to have left.

A loud popping sound overpowers the beast’s cries. The next explosion lifts Mara off her feet and spits her into the ground several yards away. She can hear the creature bellowing, but all of her is under water, sound coming from too far away.

The ground shakes again and she makes her sluggish limbs respond, lifting to a crouch.

There’s something bright at the edge of her vision to her left at a distance, closer to the howling beast than to her. The gas mask limits her visibility, the pouring rain making the scant illumination run, but it's Jun, she knows. 

He's standing, and the relief staggers her. He might have a flare or something in hand. Her gas mask’s goggles are too watery to make it out in detail.

He _should_ be running, the thought pops in her head with growing alarm. Why is he just standing there?

Several yards to her right, the creature rolls up in the dirt, still howling, but the flames are almost gone. It’s the kriffing rain. Mara takes off her gas mask to scream at Jun to run. 

He's not holding a flare.

A lightsaber. Its green beam of light piercing in the dark. Jun holds it low and behind him, almost as an afterthought, but it bathes his form in an uncanny glow.

_Who's Jun?_

Off the corner of her eye, Mara sees the creature struggling to rise. Jun raises his free hand towards it, open palmed, and it's pulled forward, as if seized by the scruff of the neck, and slammed face first into the ground. When she looks back at Jun, his hand has lowered.The beast lets out a howl that makes her feel as if the ground itself will soon split underneath her feet.

Jun sweeps the hand up. He closes his fist.

The creature throws it's head up and screams, twists as the flames spark back up, reigniting in a blinding red-yellow blast, and rising anew until they are all that is visible even in the downpour. She imagines she can feel power between the flames, through them, like the current in a stream, power stoking them up, just as it holds the beast down, trapping it, so the creature can neither flee nor attack. So that it can just...die.

And finally the paralysis fades, so that one thought blares in Mara’s head as the beast wails out its death agonies.

_Run._


	4. Chapter 4

Mara doesn’t even realize where she is until there’s machinery in front of her by the wavery light of her glowrod. The glowrod flickers and she slaps at it a couple of times until its dim light steadies somewhat.

The processing plant. 

Her heart slams against her ribs, breathing too loud in her ears. She needs to think, but she can’t stay here.

Her glowrod at her belt winks out, probably from the damage as she was thrown by the second explosion. Mara looks for the mini glowrod with trembling hands, clips that to her belt and lights it as she plunges ahead into the cluster of machinery, sneaking a glance behind her.

She has to keep moving. 

Where?

_“Your cooperation is what we would have, Mara Jade.”_

The storage section lies behind the machines, the stairs down to the tunnels are past it. Mara can't help but take stock. She'd covered all her tracks. The Empire was rubble, surely the new order had bigger concerns. But she doesn't know; everything she thought she knew feels flipped over. The last time that happened...

_Who's Jun?_

Betrayal can come from anywhere. She'd been such a fool to forget.

Cold from her sodden flightsuit seeps into her. She lifts the mini glow rod from her belt, realizing she's at the storage area. No choice but to take that opening that leads down to the stairs, but something twinges at the thought. She sucks in a breath. 

_You’ll think it strange if I say I’ve been looking for you?_

All her disquiet that creeping sense of something wrong. It'd been him all along.

“Karrinna!” The sound of Jun’s voice is no longer comforting as it rings out from the entrance. Something holds her back from the tunnels, and she slinks back further to a narrow space between the wall and some shelves instead. They teeter slightly; Mara smells musty dust all around her. That old feeling of being squeezed in wells up. The walls are black now instead of pristine white. 

_tick tack tick tack_

Not now, she thinks, closing her eyes. Not now.

The clicking sound is louder than she's heard it. She turns off her glowrod, willing her eyes to adjust.

Mara peeks behind her to the stairs, and feels gooseflesh rise up at the back of her neck.

Red eyes glow in the dark, maybe three meters away, staring forward.

What the kriff is it?

“Karrinna,” the man who isn’t Jun calls out.

The red eyes lift. If she concentrates she can hear the animal pant. The eyes have a slightly wolfish cast, rounded, but slightly slanted at the ends. It may be dark, but she can pick out where it is with a certainty she doesn't dare question. Mara stays as still as possible. It's probably not going to help, but at least that thing's not looking at her.

“I should have told you.” 

The red eyes move. It doesn’t seem to be able to smell her or it’s too drawn to the sound of Jun’s voice. Not Jun, she corrects herself. The Jedi. Jun doesn’t exist.

“I’m sorry.”

She turns her head and focuses on where the beast stalking forward. It's just beside the shelves, about five feet away.

“I don’t mean you any harm.” 

Too close for her to run behind it into the tunnels. Mara looks up, tentatively feels for the width of the shelves. If the shelves can hold her weight she can climb up. Better than being on the ground with that on the loose. 

“It's not safe here, Karrinna.”

Mara tentatively puts a foot on the shelf, it teeters slightly, but holds, so she tries another and another until she’s at the top in a crouch. 

“What you’re feeling is real...”

The creature is simply standing there waiting. She flicks her holdout onto her hand; the mechanism clicks, and the creature snuffs. Mara goes rigid. 

“...but it’s not me.”

The wolf creature snuffs again, eyes shifting. 

She gets the eerie feeling it can sense her, just doesn’t know exactly where she is. 

“It’s this place...” 

But it stares off and stops. From her elevated position, Mara sees light approaching her across the main room of the processing plant. Glowrod. Whatever she does it should be fast, while the creature below is distracted, before her pursuer reaches her. A Jedi. 

Whatever he is, he'd smashed that rancor thing to the ground with a gesture...panic wells up, and she stomps it down, steadies herself through a tight heat right at her abdomen. 

He'd _sabotaged_ her ship. 

“We have to get out of here.”

Got that kriffing right, she thinks grimly, and shifts so she's sitting on the shelf and her feet are flat on the wall. With a grimace, she pushes off hard.

The shelf goes down and so does she, hitting the ground in a roll, blaster in hand. A short howl rises through the air and she's turning to stand, clicking on the glowrod. Wide red eyes squeeze shut. Animal musk. The graze of fur by her arm. Three shots like intermittent light. Flash of sharp teeth. A lolled tongue on duracrete. 

Mara's running down the stairs. She thinks the Jedi might be yelling her name as she dives into the tunnels. Near here there has to be that repulsor platform trackline she saw earlier on the map. Mara pulls the glowrod out from her belt and raises it as she races across the basement room. Could she take the trackline back to the _Fire_? She shakes off the idea -- the _Fire_ needs the battery cells. No, she needs to return to the hangar first somehow.

She stops, breaths coming fast. There's no trackline as far as she can see, only a turbolift at the end of the passageway, its grated door open. 

Mara stares at the turbolift. Given the situation at the settlement and the power plant it can't be working. Dead end.

But then, it doesn't seem like the Corporate Sector would let something like massive power outage impede work underground. 

From the dark of the tunnel behind her: "Karrinna!"

Mara swoops into it and punches the button, pushing herself as far back at the end of the turbolift as she can and shuts down the glowrod. If this doesn't work--

The grates close, locking with a snap just as a pinprick of light becomes visible in the distance. With a lurch, the turbolift plummets down. It's going faster than she expects, for long enough that her relief fades, and she clenches her teeth at the uncomfortable feeling of being in free fall. Finally it comes to such a jerky stop she careens forward after the clank. The metallic grates unlock, the door opening.

She straightens up. As she turns on her glowrod, striding forward, she wishes for her datapad. How deep underground is this? It feels a few degrees warmer. Her flightsuit is uncomfortably damp, and the smell is worse than its ever been.

Walking further, the passageway looks like the large room with various stairways at either side. More of the mine tunnel is up ahead, the opening much larger than any she'd seen before. Four humans could walk side by side into it. There's a sign that reads ZONE 2 beside one of the stairways, which sounds promising, but not more so than the one with TRACKLINE complete with an arrow pointing into the tunnel. Mara can't help a scoff. 

The trackline becomes visible after a few minutes of walking. Built like an aerial lift with overhead cables that keep the platforms that comprise it tethered to the track, its build tells Mara it loses the bottom tracks, probably crosses over a deep valley or something like that, ahead. Mara thinks back to the map. The tracks go on for a few miles in the narrow tunnels then they come to an open area, carved into the mountain she supposed. She'd marked that area as having hatchways nearby. She looks up. Right now she's too far underground. 

As she walks on beside the platforms on the trackline she can't help thinking that in her time there wasn't a word for this. A trap months in the making. An attempt to get close enough to lead the target into their own cell. Walk them right in, a nerf to slaughter. She knows because she'd done it herself. Mara clenches her jaw.

She's paid for that too.

More concerning is his ability to hide, even from her much-honed sense of danger. She thinks of the wire moth in the conn pod and stifles a shiver.

For now, the Jedi is no doubt heading back to the hangar. He'd expect her to return for the battery cells; she can't get off planet without them. That's what _she'd_ do. Something has to occur to her between now and then.

Mara lifts her glowrod higher. She doesn't have much visibility and the trackline platforms only have mining droids on them. Nothing she can take up with her as a weapon.

But if the turbolift is working, then the trackline certainly is. Something will come to her. Has to. 

She lifts her mini glowrod, finds the control panel in the wall, and presses the ignition. She keeps moving along the track as the platforms screech forward slowly. 

Mara climbs on, breathing hard as she trudges over one platform, then the next, over and around the mining droids. Three platforms in front of her. She wants to take a minute, more, but as she stops, she gets the unmistakeable sense that she's not alone. Something's near. She raises the glowrod, but there's little she can see. 

The feeling gives her the extra push she needs to keep darting to the frontmost platform where the cab is. The trackline is goes faster now, the stagnant air around her lifting in a light breeze. Not fast enough. All of these things have a manual control, maybe she can push the acceleration. But she can't shake the feeling of someone else there, and looks behind her again.

On impulse, Mara stands between the platforms and fires into the darkness. To her horror a green blade lances out about five platforms away, shots glinting off, shattering against the ceiling, raining down sparks.

"Karrinna--"

Was he trying to _sneak up_ on her? There's something immensely gratifying about firing more shots, giving free reign to that tight feeling, useless as it is. It's almost energizing.

“I don't mean you any harm! Everything I told you was true except my name. Everything. I --”

Mara darts forward and climbs in to the head section. _How_ did he catch up to her down here? There's got to be something she can use...

Scanning around the cab, there’s a grappling gun, and a fire douser. Nothing seems immediately helpful although she slides the grappling gun's strap over her shoulder. She looks over the velocity regulation controls. The thrust on the platform repulsors are sluggish for now, the trackline is ascending. At least that means she should be getting closer to the area where the hatchways are.

The Jedi still keeps shouting but all he says is near lost in the whoosh and whirring of the repulsors. 

Mara pushes the acceleration to its limit, the display lighting up red, and punches several keys in hopes one of them releases the three platforms behind her. She's not sure if the system responded or not. Up ahead the tunnel seems to open up, bright lights coming on from the sloped walls of a cavern's opening. The lower rails disappear as the entire trackline is fully suspended by it's airlift system, crossing over about an a hundred foot drop. 

From the back, the Jedi is still shouting. Sounds closer.

Mara turns. Her blood feels frozen as sees him now three platforms away. She leaves the cab through the window climbing on top of it. She's not familiar with this trackline's make, but everything critical is where the cables are. She tries hard not to look down as the cab sways under the uneven weight distribution.

A baffling stricken note lies under all the Jedi's yelling. Mara notices, but pays it no mind; there's not a whole lot of time before the trackline goes back into the tunnels. She scans near her to a mass of suspended cables on the other side of the cavern. He's jumped from one to the other. Two platforms away. Focus, she tells herself over the jackhammer of her heartbeat. 

She grabs the grappling gun dangling from her shoulder, aims at some nearby cabling and fires. The hook hits and she's surprised it's a model that actually clips and clamps tight. Hopefully it'll hold her weight, but first she digs the muzzle of her holdout right into the thick cables that hold the car she's on.

The wind blows against her cheek as she gets off one shot, then another, and another. He's one platform away and she shuts the knowledge out. The cables are thick, meant to withstand a lot abuse. It's not surprising that her first shots do little, she keeps at it though, counting on no one having anticipated a sustained assault with superheated plasma. Soon enough the cables' outer coverings begin to rend and bend. Just in time too, the grappling hook's rope is beginning to tighten. Her car sways lightly, she looks up, and there he is just four feet away.

Before she can shoot at him to buy herself more time, the line goes tight, and her feet are off, as the trackline speeds too far. The grappling line swings her back. With some defiance, Mara looks behind her in time to see the cables begin to snap, the trackline begin to collapse into the chasm. A strident, wrenching sound roars out. 

She dangles on the rope for a few seconds when it comes to rest, pulls to engage the hoisting mechanism. While it lifts her up she tries making sense of where she is in the cavern. A catwalk rises near enough on her level, and she swings herself onto it, continuing up the stairs as high as she can, about five flights, clinging onto her initial read of the area. Once she gets as high as she can in the cavern, she goes into the entrance to the tunnel. There has to be a hatchway here. She has to have climbed up high enough for it. 

Mara fumbles for her glowrod as she darts into the tunnel. After a few moments, she has a sickening feeling she’s lost as she follows a winding path. Her breaths come out in rasps, heartbeat thundering, the panic lifting in a crescendo. She hurries, breaks into a run, hoping to catch sight of a ladder at one of the walls, but there’s no sign of anything only a cloying darkness that only peels a little from her glowrod's scant light. 

A sliver of her illumination shows a doorway and she goes into it, it leads to a catwalk that overlooks a chasm similar to the open pit area she'd initially come from, but smaller. It has a bottom she can see full of objects light in color that rise up in a mound, contrasting against the dark mineral of the mine walls, like a cluster of thousands of twigs. She looks more closely, thinks of the sor noodles and feels her stomach roil.

Bones.

Mara pulls herself away, breathing hard. A mass grave? How? Did those wolf things drag them all here? How many of those things are there?

Doesn't matter, she thinks. All she needs to go is get topside. Just that.

Mara pulls herself up the catwalk's ladder. She climbs into the tunnel above the first and continues her strides eyes peeled for any glimpse of a ladder. After what feels like hours of running she finally sees an access ladder. Her exhaustion vanishes as pushes up the hatchway and out into the evening in the forest on her hands and knees. 

Where is she now? Mara raises her head. Nothing but the evening landscape greets her. The rain has stopped and moons are out and all in intermediate phases, providing misty light. She feels like dropping to her side on the soft, wet dirt in a heap.

Her ship. She has to go back. It's _damaged_ , she thinks, with that same burn. She has to get the fuel cells, get to the Skipray...there’s something caught in her throat amid that pulsating anger and lurking exhaustion. But it’s not time. She has to keep moving. She’ll never get to the _Fire_ if she doesn’t keep moving. There’s no way to know where she is here either, her datapad’s behind with her pack. 

Mara pushes on to a standing position and clicks off her glowrod, holding the dread at bay. The field of stones stretches behind her, the white of their moss-less patches bright in the night. At least she recognizes where she is, and sets off in the town's direction. Her legs muscles are burning, drenched flightsuit squelching with every heavy footstep. If she stopped she’d be cold, but she doesn’t. Her ship. She needs to get back to her ship.

Smoke and soot remain in the air as she walks past the general area of the processing plant.The massive shape of the creature lies blackened and prone on the ground at the distance. Her mind goes back to the bones in the mines. Had _it_ done that? But how did it get underground? 

Doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Only the _Fire_. 

As Mara takes the turn that leads to the main street, they are waiting.

Two of them. They're about as big as a tusk cat, eyes glowing red, a wolf-like snout and a long, lithe spiked body with a spiked tail. She knows now her earlier escape was due to blind luck. Her holdout seems useless against two of them, even if she were lucky enough to take one down. She ducks behind a nearby building, sneaks a glance at its corner to see if they spotted her. They begin to amble her way and she's off, trudging through the collapsed remains off a wall into the building.

The creatures' footsteps crush the debris on the ground as they approach. Can she even lose them?

Mara clicks her glowrod back on half covering it with her hand. Her eyes rove around the room she's now in, feeling a wave of deja vu. She'd walked into the workshop from earlier, the one with the mining droid under repair. The droid's spiderlike shape stands a few feet from her, but there's no exit other than the doorway she came from. 

She stays close to the edge of doorway and peeks back, covering her glowrod with her hand. The creatures keep approaching. Mara carefully makes her way towards the droid. With an eye to the room's entrance, she gently prises open the control panel at one of its arms with her vibroblade. The battery power is on low, she finds, but the droid does have some, and its display lights up. There's also a variety of modes for it, but Mara's never worked with a mining droid. She darts another look towards the lone doorway in and out the room, hoping the lights for the screen are not that visible and clicks off her glowrod.

Nothing yet.

Quickly, she selects, "full mode," whatever that means. The droid is her best chance at keeping them occupied long enough that she can escape.

The crunching gets louder. Mara reaches up her thumb on the activator button behind the droid's square torso. She hears beasts sniff and knows they're tentatively walking in.

Mara flicks on the button. A loud whir of servo motors and in the next instant, the droid is rising on its four spidery legs, lighting up the room with it's high beam lights.

She throws herself behind the nearest table, seeing the creatures' heads go up.

A red beam shoots out ahead, the beam cutting through the wall beside the doorway towards her.

Laser cutter, Mara realizes belatedly as the creatures jerk to the side, startled. Kriff!

The droid makes a grinding sound, her neck prickles at it. Mara scrambles up, then drops, the laser sweeping over her head. A whir and a clank. The beam flashes through the entire room in a haphazard path, carving more grooves into the wall. Another whir and a clank. She jumps high, missing another sweep of it. Whir and clank. Dust falls from overhead. The one remaining bracket of the wall shelf lets out a loud metallic groan, pulled down by the weight of its contents. Mara scans for the creatures, the dust and the lights making the whole room hazy. 

Her neck prickles again and she drops into a roll over the roving beam, landing on her back, her blaster in hand, tracking shots to the creature who landed where she'd been.

It darts out of the way effortlessly. Too fast. Mara braces herself as it nears, alarm at a crescendo. It jumps, and Mara bends to cover her head, expecting the clamp of it's jaws--

A flash of heat and more dust. Weight on her legs. Mara pushes off with her heels from the creature's now headless body. The laser cutter is a foot or two past her.

Behind it, the second creature's eyes zero in on her. It readies to jump from where she'd been before the first creature lunged...right under the collapsing wall shelf. 

She aims high and lets loose a flurry of shots at its remaining bracket.

The shelf collapses, contents landing on the beast, some landing on the droid which lets out a sharp crackling noise and goes still.

Mara breathes.

With a crash the creature raises itself from under the debris, sending pieces of duraplast flying.

She's running, running out the entrance, out to the debris-laden street, running until it feels like her heart will explode out of her chest.

Alarm shrieks within her, she _feels_ that huge wolf creature behind her, but she recognizes she's closer to the hangar, but still too far. Too late, impact thumps on her back, lancing pain at her shoulder. She whirls as she falls, almost landing on a torn metal pipe half her height, squeezing out shots and the pressure at her shoulder is gone. Mara scrambles up, still shooting. The beast lunges and Mara grabs the metal impulsively, feels it go through as the beast lands on it, and scrambles away to the creature's howl. 

The creature off balance, smoke curling from one eye, metal pole stuck in its side.

How the kriff it still standing?

“Don’t move!”

It sounds like the Jedi. She’s hearing things now? She can’t be. 

There’s a _snap-hiss_ , the electronic hum of a lightsaber. She can’t look. Does nothing in this sithkriffing planet die?

“It’ll give chase if you run. I should have told you. I tried to...It was wrong, but I mean you no harm. You have to believe me.”

She just needs to get to the Skipray, then her ship. Everything will be okay once she gets to her ship.

“Nothing's going to hurt you.”

The creature snarls, jumps again and she rushes out of the way, bolting to the hangar. 

Once there, Mara inputs the combination to lower the gangway with shaking hands, hits the the top hangar door controls to pull them open, ignoring how the world grows hazy for a split second.

The _Fire_ , she tells herself. Everything will be okay once you get to the _Fire_. No one is going to keep her from her ship. No matter how hard they try. The last thought sends energy thrumming into her, sharpens her senses.

She needs to buy time to warm up the engines. Taking a deep breath, she keys in access for the fuel pods. It's standard preflight procedure to draw a fuel sample to check for contaminants, one can drain the tank from the outside with special machinery to regulate pressure. Only one pod should be enough to take her back to her ship.

Mara holsters her blaster, and goes for the fuel needle on the worktable, grabbing it by the fuel inlet where the hose attaches. She rushes towards the Skipray's fuel tank access and pulls out the hose. 

“Karrinna!”

That’s not my name, she thinks, turning, and slapping tank two's drain button.

The liquid comes gushing out with enough force to shove him back and he’s yelling her name. It's maybe thirty seconds of a spray at that force, once it lessens, she attaches the hose to the needle as she crouches down. She slams the needle's nozzle on the power pack hard -- _Spark up, damn you, spark up_.

The voltage current ignites a tiny blue flame at the tip of the nozzle. Mara jumps up, her hand lashing out to slam against tank three's drain button. She looks up, making sure the needle's leveled.

A lance of flame shoots out from the nozzle.

The stream is powerful enough that she almost loses her hold. She adjusts her stance, sweeps the needle to take the whole front of the hangar, until there’s a wall of flame between the entrance and where she is, licking up to the top of the hangar. The heat is incredible, the air she's breathing scorched, and scalding in her lungs, then as quickly as it built, it’s gone. No more fuel in the pod. Mara drops the fuel needle and unclips the hose, breaths harsh.

Flames flicker around the Jedi, who stands with his palm open before him, in a warding motion. His hair isn’t even singed.

She shakes her head, takes several steps back. _How_?

“What-whatever you're looking for," she shouts shakily, flicking for her holdout. "I’m not it!”

"I don't mean you any harm." Her holdout goes flying and clatters down somewhere to the side. It's not really a surprise anymore. The Jedi stays where he is. He lifts his hands. "I never have. I'm sorry. I didn't mean any of this."

Mara licks her lips and inches back further. She needs to hook the fuel hose back before she can leave.

The Jedi's features grow pained. "I didn't mean any of this," he repeats. "Here." He raises his hands and crouches down slowly. He unclips the lightsaber from his belt and rolls it in her direction. "I'm unarmed."

Mara doesn't look down at where it rolls. She'd seen him bash that rancor into the ground. He didn't need his lightsaber to take her holdout. Lightsaber or not, it makes no difference.

He cocks his head. "I’ve--I've never met another Force sensitive--someone like me. Only--only family. I was just curious at first--"

"I'm not what you think I am," she bites out. "Force whatever -- I'm not."

Dismay filters on his face. “You don't wonder what keeps you standing here? With that wound?" 

She shakes her head.

The Jedi looks uneasy. "Isard kept records of the Emperor's agents.”

She makes her face blank. "I don't know what you're talking about."

_Your cooperation is what we would have of you, Mara Jade_

“The most specific ones were about an agent with the title 'Emperor's hand'." He takes one step. "A woman. Rumored Force wielder. But even then there wasn't a lot.”

"It's a mistake," Mara forces out. "I worked in _court_. Danced. That’s all. She grabbed me by mistake.”

She knows that somehow he’s smelled the lie. Her skin crawls. She takes another step back. 

His eyes soften. "I'm sorry that happened to you. She never kept records of who she had...detained."

Somehow that reaction is worse. "I...have to go." She takes a few more steps back. 

The pained expression returns. "Your shoulder."

She looks. It's in bad shape. She wishes she hadn't looked, now it's harder to block out the pain. "It's fine."

The Jedi frowns. "The thing that caused it -- it's called a _tuk'ata_ a Sith hound. It's wounds are serious. Everything in this planet--"

"It's fine."

Her stomach drops when he shakes his head. Dread uncoiling again. There it is: "It needs to be healed."

“No. You--you stay away from me." Her voice shakes more. It’s the exhaustion and she pushes it back, gritting her teeth. "Don't touch me. Don't _ever_ touch me."

He flinches. "You won't get far with that wound. These aren't normal predators. Corbos is a dark side nexus. I should have known," he says heavily. "I'm sorry about that too. But I can heal you, and then you can go--”

She doesn't care for his stories, his _lies_. Loathing so sharp it feels like a breath of fresh air leads her to scream, “You sabotaged my ship!”

His eyes widen. “No! No! That wasn’t me." Something else seems to filter like an epiphany. "The coin, they could have been _watching_ us--”

“I paid already!" Her hands clench into fists and she feels much steadier on her feet, a welcome shock of adrenaline coursing through her deadening the pain and she clutches at it. "For being part of the Empire, know that, whoever you are -- I already paid for it.” She can’t bring herself to say more.

The Jedi quiets. "No one is going to hurt you." He lifts his hands slowly. "Or take you anywhere. You can leave. You _should_ leave. I'll heal the wound. Just that.”

“You could have killed that thing at any time," she seethes. "You were _playing_ with it!"

Alarm is written on his face. "No! Using the Force like that here is dangerous. I didn't want to risk you. Or this. Karrinna, I --"

That's not her name, she thinks and there's a welcome burn at it, that makes her earlier weariness into nothing.

He stops, and seems to reconsider. "The power you have is _real_ , and this place --" 

"You stay away." One bacta dip after another, she reminds herself. The cost of order is screams and blood. People want to think there is better. There is never better. 

"You won't make it to the _Fire_ with that wound. I only want to heal it. Just that and you can go in peace. It was only a name, doesn't change who I am. I'm still from Tatooine. I still have a twin sister. Everything I told you was true."

Her vision grows blurry for a second and she teeters. Like just a few hours ago his hand goes to her elbow, meaning to steady her, but now all she thinks is that he sabotaged her ship, made them crash into this hellplanet. He wants to trick her and drag her back to another cell. Worse, wants her to _walk herself_ into it. She shuts her eyes.

"I never wanted this," he whispers. "Not for you...or us. Please believe me." 

His droid at her ship, the memory surfaces. Doing what? Changing her security protocols? Taking her ship away. Stealing it.

Her eyes open. For a second she feels _everything_ , not just her own rage and fear, but the Jedi's own well of regret and horror, feels past it to a a deeper, more desperate rage embedded in dirt and stone. In the blink of an eye, she gathers it, makes it hers. 

It sears as an electric arc uncoils from her palms, bursting out with the snap of a whipcrack, her scream wrenching out with it.

When the smoke clears the Jedi lies slumped on the floor at the opposite wall. Faint tendrils of smoke curl upwards from his form.

Mara stands, dazed, unsteady, but feeling lighter, as if there’s been some reorganization of her molecules. A deep sting at her hands calls her attention. When she looks at them, a thin layer of smoke clears revealing red, raised welts. 

What just happened?

For now, she stumbles towards her blaster. After she has it in her throbbing hands, she lurches over to where the Jedi remains prone. It would be as easy as pulling the trigger. Undoubtedly there'd be others at her trail, but he would be one less. You never leave an enemy, she remembers that lesson well enough.

Squeeze the trigger, she thinks. That is all. 

_Couldn't sleep?_

Mara goes still. A stupid triviality. Just what he'd asked so many nights when she'd wandered into the galley during the middle of the night. For a second she's back there at the _Fire's_ galley, right at that moment, even though it's gone and never coming back.

She can’t do it. 

He might be a liar ready to drag her back to a cell. He might have deceived her for months and sabotaged her ship, but she can’t. She's always been a fool. 

So she holsters her holdout and plods back to the Skipray, clips the hose back and closes the fuel tank access. A heavy oily feeling spreads along her insides, but it’s not time yet for a full accounting of this disaster. She has a droid to destroy. Her ship to take back. She sets her focus on that as she starts up the repulsors.

The Skipray lifts from the landing bay, and she rises into the darkened sky, keeping low since she’s not completely sure where the _Fire_ is and will have to locate it by sight. 

The buildings of the settlement grow small as she crosses over to the woods. In the distance she sees the hilly area with the stones. It might be the exhaustion but the landscape seems to move and roll in her vision. She squints at it, but her vision stays blurry. Landslide?

An explosion thunders out, spitting dirt and stone into the air, clouding up her vision through the transparisteel. Something hits the Skipray and she can’t make anything out of the view from the transparisteel, only a huge shadow. The Skipray's suddenly spinning out of her control.

 _Is_ it a shadow? she wonders before impact, a high banking that makes her stomach lurch and vision swim more. The Skipray comes to a shuddering stop on dirt, but the ground hasn't stop trembling.

Mara undoes her restraints, shuffling towards the emergency exit and pushes herself out the top of the ship. 

The landscape is unrecognizable or maybe it's her. The ground shakes all around. More of the large creature’s friends? Her breath catches on a scream once it comes into view and she falls on her side on the top of the Skipray, blaster in hand, knowing it's not going to help.

 _This_ creature seems to go forever, it’s body is slithery, bipedal, and vaguely reptilian, nearly twice the size of the first creature hunting them through the woods. The shadows from the Skipray’s lights play upon its trunk. Off high up something glitters. Its eyes? She wants to get up, wants to run, but can't. Her legs aren't responding. Nor her arms. Nothing.

The bones in the mine, she thinks. The screams in the stones. 

This foul thing _keeps_ them.

Its cavernous mouth opens. Mara expects a bellow like the first creature. She doesn't expect human screams.

Thousands of them.

\--

She wakes up like surfacing, bends and retches viscous fluid, more of it drips down her face, her hair.

Her head’s hazy, her body too heavy to keep herself up. 

She closes her eyes and slumps down with a wet smack.

\--

Mara sits up awake. She's not in her cabin.

“Good, you’re up,” she recognizes Mensio's voice. 

Something about it has her on guard and she turns her head to where he's sitting on a nearby chair, her shoulder twinging at the motion. The room is darkened, light peeping from under the blinds of the nearby window makes her think it might be afternoon. It looks like a simple hotel room. There's just the bed she's on, a desk and the chair where Mensio is sitting. It's strange that he's in the room while she'd been sleeping. They've never shared a hotel room.

“Where are we?” she croaks.

“Obroa-skai.” He stands up, datapad in hand. There’s nothing different about him, but she struggles not to inch back.

“What happened? I’m not remembering clearly.” Bandaging on her hands catches her eye and she stiffens. 

“We were attacked. At Corbos during a job. How do you feel?”

The last time she’d gotten a gap like this in her memory had been nearly two years ago, only so many ways to mangle a body before the brain gave up. Even bacta couldn’t repair some things. 

"Fine." Her voice feels as if passed through a sieve. “Who attacked us?” 

Mensio doesn’t answer for a long moment. "It was an...animal attack, but more than that. We were set up."

 _Set up_ ? Her voice shakes only a little when she asks, “The _Fire_.”

Mara notices how he reaches up hand towards her arm before stopping himself, letting it fall limply down his side. Her unease climbs up further even though he says, “She’s fine. In the shop.” 

“Who?”

Mensio's face darkens. "Do you remember this?” He produced something circular the color of a cred chip. A coin of some sort?

It has an circle framed by three spokes on either side of it on its surface. Mara doesn’t recognize it, but that doesn’t stop a chill from passing through her. 

"No." Mara makes herself exhale slowly. Probably the main smuggling gang in the sector's calling card. Just means they should leave as soon as possible. “How long ago was this?”

“Six days.”

“Six days?” She feels her brow furrow. Corbos isn't that far -- only a couple of days. Were they shot down? How could she have been out for that long?

“We had hyperdrive issues, had to sublight it black here. We just got in twelve hours ago.”

She nods, pretending all her alarms aren’t blaring. She needs to regroup, take stock.

"The ‘fresher is over there.” Mensio gestures to the left. "I just changed your bandages, but you can change them again if you want."

"It's okay." Mara pads over to the 'fresher. The bandages would explain why he's there, so she feels a little ungrateful for being so wary. The image that greets her in the mirror makes her gasp. She must have hit her head hard, hard enough that a blood vessel burst in her left eye, turning the white of it dark, ghastly red. That explains the six days. She's lucky Mensio didn't dump her at some random medcenter. This is above and beyond his responsibilities.

She pulls at her flightsuit to look at her shoulder. She has three jagged claw marks that run several inches over her shoulder and down her back, as if some clawed creature grabbed at her from behind. They look deep, but are mostly healed, to the point where she wonders why she still feels them.

She opens the bandages in her hands next. Her palms have strange spindly red burn marks on them, but don't hurt at all. She washes her face then bandages them up again and goes back out. Whatever happened, she was clearly the target. Mensio doesn't look any worse for wear.

Mara lifts her chin. “I want to see my ship.”

He nods. “We’re in the spaceport.”

She’d never had enough credits for a room in a spaceport, dingy as they were. Usually she just stayed in her ship.

"The _Fire_ needed some heavy work," Mensio says and something about that remark feels unsettling too.

Her eye travels to a chair to her left where her boots are and she heads in that direction. She despises losing time, she thinks as she puts on her boots. A set up, an animal attack, the words loop in her head without making any sense. There’s only this feeling in her gut. A sense of _wrongness_. Seeing the _Fire_ will help. She can try to untangle the rest after with Mensio. She looks around after she's done, reaching for her empty holster on the table.

"My holdout?"

"It got lost."

Mara furrows her brow. "Lost?"

Reluctantly, he says, "Eaten."

Mara decides she'll ask for details later. It's going to be a hassle and more credits to get another holdout blaster, and that's the bigger issue. Mensio waits for her and they leave the room going down to the turbolift. 

“That coin that Artoo found..." He begins, his expression uncharacteristically drawn. "It's from a shadow organization.”

Mara watches him from the corner of her eye. This isn't news to her. “Like the Zann Consortium.”

“Not exactly.” Mensio’s voice is grim. “They worship the Sith.” 

Her head snaps in his direction. “What?” 

But the turbolift arrives, and they’re in the main access corridors, weaving through the crowd as they head to one of the repair bays. She’s going to ask more, but she feels a weird prickling at her neck as Mensio steps forward with quick strides. A growing sense of alarm has her looking around...as if there were eyes on her though nothing strikes her when she scans around the masses of beings. She misses her holdout already.

Mensio comes to a stop in front of some blastdoors. She stares as he inputs an access code. As if that weren’t enough, yet another set of doors appear before her. He inputs another code.

She can’t afford this level of security.

Another thought breaks through; Mensio shouldn't either.

Finally the _Fire_ is before her, alone in the empty repair bay, and she turns her focus to it. Her ship is badly scuffed up. Even from where she stands it looks like she took a beating. Doesn't look like a dogfight though, looks more like...a crash.

Mensio stays behind as she approaches. “They’re missing the exteriors, everything else is done." 

He'd had them fix the _Fire_ in less than a day? For heavy work? To ride techs that hard isn’t easy, even if one did have the credits -- she gasps as more of her ship comes into view, breaking the thought.

The _Fire's_ small docking bay is open, exposing the Headhunter inside. She steps towards it, the plume of fire from one wing clear in her memory, but the wing now above her lies shiny and unmarred. She remembers not being able to afford to get the 'fighter back, the sinking feeling as she went over the cost with the techs, their stony expressions as they shook their heads.

She should be delighted, but all she can think of is, where did those credits come from?

The techs left a box of their tools beside the 'fighter. Mara takes it to the workshop area at the side of the repair bay to channel some of the nervous energy that wraps tighter within her. 

A crash can be caused by many things, pilot error, bad atmospheric conditions, mechanical failure...

Sabotage.

Mensio did say they were set up.

"Our things are already inside. We have to go. The rest can be handled once we're out of the sector."

Mara stops. This makes sense. She'd just been thinking about the need to leave. Her back is to Mensio, but she doesn't turn around, because her sense of wrongness has not eased up at all. The opposite, actually.

She's somehow sure that Mensio is not who he says he is.

His footsteps thud behind her. “Captain, it's not safe here.” 

No principles but the ones you pay for. 

She can taste danger in the air, feel it on her skin like mist. Something is coming. 

Someone. Maybe more than one. She doesn't have her blaster.

From the corner of her eye, she sees Mensio's positioned himself subtly between her and the blastdoors of the docking bay, like he doesn't know she'd _never_ leave her ship. 

The toolbox is only a few inches from her hands. There's a cutting torch inside.

Maybe whoever's coming is already here.

Under the bandages, her palms almost prickle for the torch. Sting for it. 

Mensio's voice takes on a very flat, very calm tone that in no way diminishes the note of warning. "Mara Jade, you need to listen to me.”

And Mara thinks of wire moths. They can bore through anything. 

  


end.

[>Bonus punchy ending track](https://youtu.be/hDq2oLizU1E)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, these crazy kids. They'll work it out. *nervous laughter*
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and, especially to those who treated me with conversation! Even though it turned out to be a chore at times, I did have loads of fun writing it! <3
> 
> I have to give credit where credit is due, this story started from a bunny I got thanks to threadsketch, i.e. the adventures of Karrinna Jansih and Jundland Mensio. The hunting idea probably came from an old convo with JediMordSith from way back during Ricochet. This traverses similar ground with some notable differences.
> 
>  
> 
> Canon notes:
> 
> 1\. Should have probably included this before, but oh look it's GFFA's answer to Weyland Yutani i.e. the [Corporate Sector Authority](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Corporate_Sector_Authority/Legends). Money quote:The CSA possessed exclusive rights to use the sector's resources as it saw fit; the corporations within the region would typically strip a planet bare, often using slave labor or destroying the world's natural environment in the process. The majority of the Authority's residents consisted of the working class; citizenship, which granted limited "shareholder" rights, was purchased, putting it out of the reach of most laborers. Labor relationships were extremely poor and most people lived in impoverished conditions
> 
> 2\. They do the mash, the monster mash: [tuk'ata](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tuk%27ata), [leviathan](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Leviathan_\(creature\)). 
> 
> 3\. In fact a lot of the key elements of this come from the comic [Leviathan](http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Star-Wars-Jedi-Academy-Leviathan), twisted for my purposes (all the mine shit is mine, for better or worse). Add Mara, an earlier timeline, and low key Sith cults. Because I find hidden evil the creepiest.
> 
> 4\. Speaking of which, [Sith cults](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_cult).

**Author's Note:**

> Canon notes, so you can see where I pieced this damn thing from:
> 
> 1\. The coin's design looks like [this](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/70/9a/4b/709a4b37ebc6c1adfe7438e6ce8d616b.jpg).
> 
> 2\. The monster in question is not going to be named, but it's [this](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Terentatek/Legends). Since it came from a video game, most images except [this one](https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e57f53a9d0cd292de56706c6e9c481a8) are hokey. That last one? Kinda don't wanna meet up something like that while camping. Not that I'm the camping sort.
> 
> 3\. The stone cluster they dove into should look like [this](http://www.montanregion-erzgebirge.de/fileadmin/Welterbe_Aktuell/media/Pressebilder/Schneeberg_2.jpg). Ignore the cabin on top.
> 
> 4\. My idea for the alias was stolen and cobbled from[ here](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jundland) and the one (Mensio) used in _Specter of the Past_ when checking out the Cavrilhu Pirates. No in-story connection to either.


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